07. Mike Simpson explores the health benefits of drumming.
10.
WEATHERINGTHESTORMS
Dr Liz Stafford discusses challenges and solutions in primary music
18. EVERYCOPYCOUNTS
Aileen Douthwaite explores the Schools’ Printed Music Licence.
25. UKECANDOIT
Helen Byard shares her school’s approach to whole class ukulele lessons
Dr Liz Stafford explores low cost options for making music in your classroom
32. ELEVATEYOURTEACHING
Jodie Underhill introduces a new set of frameworks for teaching, learning, and assessment from the ISM Trust.
37.
28. HOWTOBEAGREAT MUSICSUBJECTLEADER
Dr Liz Stafford offers her advice.
R O M T H E E D I T O R
Welcome to our Spring 2025 issue! As ever, we have a great mix of features written by teachers just like you! Whether you’re considering introducing ukuleles to your curriculum, want to know the legal ins-and-outs of photocopying music, are facing challenges in your school, or want to use drumming for wellbeing, you’ll find all this and more amongst our pages.
In December, at three weeks’ notice, our hosting platform Issuu put our subscription price up from a few hundred pounds nearly £3000! Needless to say this was a bit of a shock, especially in the middle of a publication year that we had already costed. We are sadly now facing significant challenges in keeping the magazine free to read in the future.
If you value the magazine and would like to support us, there are a couple of things you can do to help. If you have a product or service that you sell to primary schools, please consider advertising with us. Or, if you would like to make a small donation to our running costs you can do so by clicking on the 'Buy me a coffee' button below.
As ever, we are really grateful for your support to help us continue to produce a magazine that is free to read for teachers all around the world
The rhythm of life
Mike Simpson explores the health benefits of drumming
Music improves our wellbeing –we’ve all heard that before. But how? The term ‘wellbeing’ is so broad –what exactly does it mean? Are there specific musical activities we can be doing with children that target improving specific needs? If so, will it help the children academically, socially, and emotionally, and – most importantly – how can we prove it?!
For the past 23 years I have facilitated global arts workshops with all ages of children throughout the UK and across the world. My wife, Jacqui, and I founded Inspire-Works in 2002 and lead a team of 18 workshop facilitators from 12 different countries who have facilitated workshops to well over 1 million participants. It doesn’t matter if our facilitators are leading a Caribbean steel pan, Japanese taiko drumming, West African drumming, Brazilian samba drumming, Indian dohl drumming or Indonesian
gamelan workshop, we frequently get the participants at the end of the workshop saying, “I feel great!”
This has always fascinated me – is this more than just a ‘feel-good’ experience for the participants who have enjoyed an exciting and inspiring ‘hands-on’ workshop? Or is there actually something deeper going on? Is there anything that is happening to our bodies when we participate in group-drumming that has made our bodies and minds be healthier? In the school or youth group context, could groupdrumming help young people improve their social and emotional mental health? Could groupdrumming therefore help improve their confidence, academic achievements, and foster a more positive outlook? If it can do all these things, most importantly - how can we prove it?
Armed with these burning questions and excitement of what groupdrumming could achieve to help the social and emotional mental health of young people, I set off on a journey of research lasting almost a decade. This journey took me to Austin Texas to be trained as a Remo HealthRHYTHMS facilitator, to a year of mentoring with one of the world’s leading music therapists in California, and to Rhythm2Recovery facilitator training developed by a therapist in Australia who specialises in evidencebased interventions utilising rhythm to assist with social and emotional learning and recovery from trauma. I also greatly valued the training I received as a Mental Health Youth First Aider to recognise various potential social and emotional issues, and the guidance on assessing artsbased therapies which I received as an Associate of the Royal Society for Public Health.
Drummers are often the butt of jokes about their brains, but as part of my research I soon discovered there is a wealth of neuroscience research into the positive effects of groupdrumming. Much of these scientific research projects use blood test samples (rather than just anecdotal evidence) to give concrete evidence and are done with people who are not drummers or have previously expressed a particular disposition for drumming. These neuroscience studies have shown that engagement in group-drumming activities can lead to various outcomes, including heightened natural killer cell activity (so their immune systems are
boosted), decreased levels of stress and burnout, enhanced mood states, improved creativity, and social bonding, among other benefits.
At the height of the Covid Pandemic we released the #BodyPercussion #RecoveryCurriculum using funding from Arts Council England. This combined my knowledge with the recommendations set out in Professor Barry Carpenter’s great work of the Recovery Curriculum. As Professor of Mental Health in Education at Oxford Brookes University, Professor Carpenter and his son Matthew (who is Vice Principal of a school academy in the Midlands) stated in the Recovery Curriculum the potential issues children might face after being away from the classroom for many months. Knowing that UK government Covid restrictions stated that singing and the sharing of musical instruments were not allowed in the classroom, we thought body percussion seemed like the perfect fit to help children and teachers explore and discuss the issues raised that Professor Carpenter states. We were astounded when within 3 weeks of publication in August 2020, our #BodyPercussion #RecoveryCurriculum was used by over 200,000 children in 1,500 schools in 27 countries!
Since the pandemic, we have worked with our facilitators to develop a programme which we named the Drumbeatable Programme and have been delivering it to groups of children in primary and secondary schools throughout London and the South East.
The Drumbeatable Programme uses percussion instruments instead of the body, with more varied activities to help sustain the programme over a longer duration, and more clearly defined assessment and evaluation tools to prove the impact of the programme for each participant. Each activity in Drumbeatable Programme has been carefully chosen and is mapped to evidencebased studies which show how they are intended to help the social and emotional resilience of the participants. These rhythm-based activities are backed up by the Drumbeatable Programme Evaluation Framework which monitors both the needs and progression of each individual participating in the programme.
It has been so rewarding to see how the participating children have been impacted by the Drumbeatable Programme and how this has affected their concentration, academic progress and social and emotional health.
Scaling up
In early 2024 we reached the capacity for the number of Drumbeatable Programme sessions our facilitators could deliver in schools that academic year, so we thought – why not train other people to deliver it?!
We were aware of three factors that would differ from the way we’d been delivering the programme ‘in-house’
Child C at the beginning of the programme appeared to be quite anxious at trying new things and would prefer to watch others before deciding to join in with the drumming activities. However, by Week 4, Child C became one of the most responsive members of the group and often wanted to take a lead in the activities and use the drum as a tool to express their feelings.
with Inspire-Works facilitators; 1) the range of available drums and percussion instruments in each school will greatly differ, 2) even highly experienced music teachers will have differing levels of confidence in delivering groupdrumming programmes, 3) teachers will have differing levels of knowledge and experience of delivering arts-based therapies to improve social and emotional health.So, we developed different levels of training to best suit anyone who is interested in using the programme in their setting, offering different levels of support, both inperson and online. We also ensured all activities in the Drumbeatable
Programme can be delivered using any type of drum commonly found lurking at the bottom of a typical school music trolley!
We have been delighted to train nearly 150 teachers in 2024 in addition to presenting the programme at several music hub conferences, nationally at the Music Teachers’ Association annual conference, and to be featured on the MTA Podcast when presenter Patrick Johns stated: “I urge all music educators to listen to Mike Simpson talking about how group-drumming helps children’s mental health, all backed up with medical research. This should surely be part of all schools’ game plans to help young people.”
Over the weeks, the drumming activities helped Child A open up about their true feelings and at the end of one activity (which used shakers as analogy for feelings) they shared they were feeling sad for some time as their grandmother was unwell. This was a big step forwards for them to feel comfortable sharing their feelings within the group.”
Mike Simpson is the co-founder of Inspire-Works, author of Hal Leonard’s Teach and Play series, and an examiner for Trinity College London.
Weathering the storms
Dr Liz Stafford discusses challenges and solutions in primary music
No two schools are exactly the same, and that’s especially the case for the schools of our readers, who come from six of the seven continents of the world! You may have specialist or generalist delivery, be a public or private school, have a mixed or mono-cultural school community, be based in an affluent or deprived area, and so on. This means that there is never really a one-size-fits-all solution to the challenges that schools face. However, there are perhaps some universal themes that readers of this magazine will recognise as being familiar issues in school music provision, for which we can offer at least some starting point solutions for schools and even governments to consider.
Lack of Confidence & Expertise
Many primary school teachers receive minimal training in music during their teacher education, leaving them feeling ill-equipped to deliver engaging and effective lessons. Even if they come from a
musical background themselves, teachers can feel unsure as to how to deliver music lessons in a pedagogically sound manner if their training has not covered this aspect. And if they don’t happen to have that musical background at all, then they can often have no idea where to start.
The most logical instant solution to this challenge is to buy in an allsinging-all-dancing scheme of work for teachers to use. Some people are snooty about schemes, but in reality if your choice is teaching from a scheme or not teaching at all, then obviously there’s only one choice! Even for specialist teachers, commercially available schemes may well have been designed by a team with a collective level of expertise that is beyond that of an individual teacher. Plus they are major timesavers with no need to hunt around for or create your own resources. However, a scheme can only go as far as the teachers are willing to engage with it. Ideally you would look for a scheme which required teachers to engage with lesson plans and think
about their delivery, rather than a plug-and-play option where you simply load up the next lesson and let the screen deliver it.
Of course, what would be much more efficient and effective would be to catch this problem before it hits our schools; by including music as a significant proportion of a teacher training degree. Here in the UK it is not uncommon for teacher training to include only 5 or 6 hours of music in total, so it’s no wonder that newly qualified teachers feel ill-equipped to deliver music once they get into the classroom. Why should individual schools have to spend precious time and budget picking up the pieces of this system when it could so easily, and far more cheaply, be solved before our teachers graduate? The original National Plan for Music Education in England (2012-2020) included a pilot project for getting add-on music content into ITT courses, which was dropped with no real explanation just a year or so into the plan; a crying shame as this was an initiative that could have made a more significant difference to the quality of music in our schools than all of the rest of the plan combined!
Lack of Time and Funding for Long-Term Meaningful CPD
As it stands, then, generalist teachers – particularly those in the UK – are likely to need significant in-service training if they are to deliver music successfully. The most successful commercially available schemes-ofwork recognise this, offering inbuilt CPD modules, in the best examples at
individual lesson level, so that teachers can be upskilled as they go.
If your scheme doesn’t have this feature, or if you have decided against the use of a scheme, then your school will need to work out a CPD strategy for music.
The main challenge with this is that to be effective, CPD needs to live up to what it stands for: continuing professional development. Many schools struggle to allocate time and funding for long-term CPD in music, with the worst-case result being that teachers avoid teaching music and therefore become more and more deskilled over time. Sometimes this is about priorities, with schools thinking music is ‘less important’ than other subjects, and sometimes it’s just because there is no money and no time! Many music hubs and MATs in the UK have spoken with me recently about numbers of teachers accessing even free CPD (in all subjects) being way down on previous years, as schools struggle to find budget for cover, and individual teachers feel they have too much on their plates to take on any ‘non-essential’ activities.
If your school is prioritising other forms of CPD over music, there are tactics that you can use to ensure that teachers are getting at least a little bit of regular training. Start by always asking the question ‘what does this look like in music’ during CPD for any general initiative your school is promoting, underlining the point that music is a practical subject which is delivered very differently from other areas of the curriculum.
What does that mean for growth mindset, retrieval practice, reading strategy, and so on? Will these initiatives be successful if teachers don’t know how to deliver them across all subjects?
If you’re a confident musician, you might feel equipped to deliver regular mini training sessions in staff meetings, open your classroom up to others while you teach a demonstration lesson, or take over a slot on your next INSET day. However it’s unlikely you’ll have the capacity to turn this into a rigorous training programme that will effect real change. Some schools who employ a specialist have the class teacher work alongside them, being upskilled as they go, with the ultimate aim of them taking back control of the music in their class. This can be a really powerful model when delivered right; it’s important that the specialist understands that the generalist is not a specialist, and demonstrates techniques, activities, and resources that are accessible to the teacher, otherwise it can do more harm than good!
What is really needed of course, is more government intervention! Governments around the world have shown it is perfectly possible to ringfence funding for CPD and mandate that teachers are released for a certain amount of training per year. This takes all the stress away from the individual teacher and the school, since the training is required, and paid for! The, still fairly new, UK government recently indicated that
they would bring in a Teacher Training Entitlement for ongoing professional development, and we await further details of that with healthy curiosity!
Lack of Budget and Space for Effective Resourcing
Music education requires proper instruments, technology, and resources for effective learning. However, budget constraints mean that many schools operate with outdated or insufficient equipment. In addition, the lack of suitable teaching space in some schools limits the scope of practical activities, making it difficult to deliver a full curriculum.
Much like the CPD issue, there can be many reasons behind this particular challenge. Sometimes there is no money. Literally no money. In which case, schools might explore alternative funding sources such as grants, fundraising events, and partnerships with local businesses. Sometimes though, it’s about priorities, with schools thinking of instruments and music equipment as a ‘nice to have’ rather than an essential resource. In this scenario it can often help to point out the statutory requirements of the curriculum in the country in which you teach. If it says you have to teach instruments, and you don’t have any instruments, then you are not meeting your statutory requirements, and that could get you into trouble with whoever the regulatory body
overseeing schools in your region is. I recently saw an anecdote on Twitter (don’t make me call it X!) where a teacher was told there was no more money for pencils, so he taught for an entire week without making the children write anything down and guess what? The next week they bought him pencils! I doubt it would have quite the same impact if you stopped teaching music, but it goes to show that ‘no money’ often turns into ‘some money’ if you can get your point across effectively.
Here in England, the previous government recognised that there was a need for investment into instruments, the last big injection of cash for this purpose having been given during the Wider Opportunities programme between 2007 and 2011. As such, the Music Hubs have been given a capital grant to spend on instruments and equipment, and some of them are turning this over directly to their schools. If you’re based in England it is well worth finding out what your local hub’s intentions are for this funding, as they might be able to offer you some support.
Competing Priorities Squeezing the Timetable
If you can’t access funding for new instruments, why not pool your collections with local schools or others in your MAT, cluster or chain? Maybe one school can lend you their djembes while you lend them your ukuleles, and so on? This would ensure that you have a good variety of instruments for your pupils to explore, for only the cost of transporting them between schools.
We all know that there is never enough time to do everything that we want to do in school! The pressure to fit everything in often results in music being squeezed from the curriculum, thanks to its lowly place in the hierarchy of subjects where English and Maths are king. This can be a particular issue in faith schools, which often have to give considerable extra time to religious education, leaving very little time to share between the other subjects.
The solution to this is not to put music on a rota! Music is a practical subject which needs to be taught little and often since it involves motor skills development alongside cognitive work. It’s important to get
across the message to those in charge of your school’s timetable that you cannot teach music across big gaps and expect to make any reasonable kind of progress. So what is the solution? Well there isn’t an easy one; at some point some subjects are going to end up deprioritised in favour of others. My advice would be that music is not the subject to pick for this kind of deprioritisation – but then I would say that, wouldn’t I?!
What does help is when government policy underlines the value of all subjects. In England, when the school inspectorate Ofsted changed their framework in 2018, meaning that any subject could be chosen as an area of focus in an inspection, it caused a huge upsurge in schools taking music and the other foundation subjects more seriously. Prior to this, schools felt that Ofsted only cared about English and Maths, so that was all they focused on. 2018 was the first time I started to regularly see headteachers turn up to music CPD and events, and the trend continues to this day. With another change to the inspection framework in the pipeline, I hope that all this good work will not be undone, although I have to say the signs are not good from what has been released so far!
Lack of Proper Support for SEND and Understanding of Subject-Specific Adjustments
Music education should be inclusive, allowing pupils with special educational needs and disabilities
(SEND) to participate fully. However, coming right back round to that lack of music training again, many schools lack the necessary support and expertise to make meaningful adjustments, resulting in limited opportunities for pupils with SEND to engage with music.
The good news is that there are plenty of training programmes and organisations out there that can help with advice and support for making subject-specific reasonable adjustments for pupils with SEND. The bad news is that if your school can’t afford to provide CPD or appropriate teaching resources, then as far as you are concerned, these opportunities may as well not exist!
A small step that your school can take towards developing inclusive provision would be to prioritise this as the first stage in any music CPD they are organising. If you’re only having one music training this year –or this decade – make it about inclusive practice in music! And if you’re having general training about inclusion, ask that question again: ‘What does this look like in music?’ If your school has someone in charge of inclusion, a SENDCo or equivalent, your school has the opportunity to make it a requirement that this person receives training in subjectspecific strategies, so that they can cascade this information down to other teachers. In England, each Music Hub is required to have an Inclusion Lead; so if you’re based here, find out who yours is and what they can do to support you.
The majority of governments already mandate that education should be accessible to and inclusive of pupils with SEND, but in an underfunded, over-worked system, this is not enough. Governments need to ensure that teachers are fully trained in all aspects of subject-specific inclusive practice before they enter the workforce, and that sufficient funding is available to deliver the reasonable adjustments that our SEND pupils are entitled to and deserve.
Your own school may be experiencing some, or all, or none of these challenges! But what is clear is that while schools can and will step up to implement their own solutions, these can only go so far. Systemic issues within education can be significant barriers to delivering excellent music
provision in all settings, and governments must play their part in mitigating these for the benefit of future generations. This doesn’t mean putting money into shiny new initiatives, fronted by ‘celebrity’ musicians, to grab a headline or two; these will only ever benefit a small minority of children. Instead governments need to identify and permanently correct the faults within the system to ensure that all schools are equipped with the expertise and resources to teach curriculum music effectively for the benefit of all children.
Dr Liz Stafford is Director of Music Education Solutions®, Editor of Primary Music Magazine, and author of The Primary Music Leader’s Handbook
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Every copy counts!
Aileen Douthwaite explores the Schools Printed Music Licence
Did you know that all state schools in Scotland, England and Northern Ireland have access to a Schools Printed Music Licence (SPML), fully funded by the Scottish Government, Department for Education or Education Authority in Northern Ireland? This licence allows schools to legally photocopy, scan, print, and arrange sheet music for use in the classroom. It’s an invaluable tool for British teachers, enabling them to deliver music education on limited budgets without worrying about copyright restrictions.
The SPML simplifies copyright compliance for schools by covering permissions from a wide range of publishers across the UK. This means you no longer need to seek individual permissions for copying or arranging music used in your curriculum.
It’s already paid for—all you need to do is register on the PMLL portal to take advantage of the licence.
But why is reporting so important? By logging your sheet music copies, you ensure that composers and songwriters are paid fairly for their work, and publishers understand which music is popular, allowing them to commission more resources tailored to teachers’ needs. While reporting what you are copying is a legal copyright requirement, it’s also your opportunity to shape the future of music education publications.
We know that teachers are busy, so we’ve worked hard to make the reporting process as simple as possible. The PMLL portal offers several options to suit your workflow, whether you prefer to upload data
termly or keep track throughout the year and upload annually. We’ve even created downloadable templates to help you gather the necessary information quickly and efficiently that you can find on our Every Copy Counts website.
What do you need to report?
Printed publications: Include the title of the work, the book title, the composer or arranger, and the music publisher.
Digital downloads: Add the source website alongside the title, composer or arranger, and publisher.
How do you report?
Log in to the PMLL portal and register your school if you haven’t already—it only takes a couple of minutes. Use our templates to collect the required data. Upload your data termly or at the end of the academic year before the June deadline. Uploading data is quick and user-friendly, but if you have any questions or run into challenges, our team is here to help.
We have been using the PMLL portal to submit our data in school. It is quick and easy to use and has highlighted how important it is that musicians are rightly paid for their work.
When you report your sheet music copies, you’re not just fulfilling a legal requirement—you’re making a tangible impact on the music industry in the UK.
We spoke with Paul Wood and Mark Wilson, the talented composers behind the Stringtastic beginner string series. Both experienced music teachers, Paul and Mark initially composed music to fill a gap they encountered in their own teaching—a need for engaging, tailored material that wasn’t readily available. They shared valuable insights into how reporting photocopied sheet music directly impacts their ability to continue creating resources that benefit educators and students.
“It’s interesting the number of pictures and videos we’ve been sent of people enjoying our books that we can see photocopies in that aren’t actually registered. And the reason we know that is when we get our royalty cheques; it says how many photocopies have been reported. Apparently, there are no photocopies of Stringtastic out there, but we know there are quite a lot.” – Paul Wood, co-composer of Stringtastic.
Hannah Massett Music Lead, Birkby Junior School
Imagine your favourite classroom resource — a songbook or choral arrangement — that gets used year after year. The composer of that resource relies on royalties to make a living, and those royalties are calculated based on the data you provide. Without accurate reporting, composers may not receive the recognition or income they deserve.
When publishers know which pieces are popular, they’re more likely to commission similar works. This means more resources tailored to your needs as a teacher. Without this data, publishers are left in the dark, and the risk of fewer classroom-friendly resources becomes a reality.
“The difference it could make to materials being published is so important” - Mark Wilson, cocomposer of Stringtastic.
As a teacher, you have the unique ability to inspire the composers, songwriters, and musicians of tomorrow. By ensuring the music you copy is reported, you’re setting an example of respect for intellectual property and supporting a sustainable future for the music industry. One day, the students you have inspired to pursue music may find themselves in the same position as today’s composers, relying on this system to support their careers.
Our School Outreach Officers are here to support you in making the most of the SPML. They offer free advice, training, and support sessions tailored to your school’s needs. Whether you have questions about the reporting process or want help integrating it into your existing workflow, they’re just an email away.
If you are working in education in the UK you can reach out to us with any questions. We’re here to help.
Submitting data through the portal has been a simple and effective way for our school to support the musicians who enrich our students' education.
Tom Mosley Assistant Headteacher Farnley Tyas First School.
We developed the Every Copy Counts campaign in the UK to help raise awareness within schools. The associated website, headed by our mascot Copycat, is your one-stop shop for everything related to the SPML.
Visit www.everycopycounts.co.uk to explore these resources and start your reporting journey today.
Uke can do it!
Helen Byard shares her school’s approach to whole class ukulele lessons
I would like to recommend the ukulele as my favourite whole class ensemble teaching instrument.
Before I explain why ukuleles are great I would just like to say I also teach ocarinas to Year 2, recorders to Year 3, glockenspiels to Year 4 and Year 5 drumming, using djembe drums and table drumming. But the ukuleles are especially reserved for my Year 6’s for the whole 33 weeks. They sit proudly on the wall in the music room and the children see them as the ultimate prize at the end of their primary years’ music lessons. I decided to teach the ukulele in Year 6 as I personally feel confident that, from EYFS upwards, I have provided the pupils with the foundations of musical elements ( like pulse, rhythm, pitch, harmony, tempo, dynamics) so they are ready to focus for an extended amount of time to learn an instrument with a specialist teacher.
Obviously, pupils can learn an instrument from an earlier age but I feel that pupils need some other mature skills, such as concentration, determination, embedded growth mindset, self-analysis and good humour to learn an instrument with longer lasting benefits.
Reggie Lawrence is a specialist ukulele (and guitar) teacher from Kent Music. He teaches a weekly one hour music lesson per class. Together, we have grown this as an inclusive, workable, meaningful and enjoyable music programme that our Year 6 pupils really look forward to. This is largely down to a good partnership and good communication. We discuss the pupils needs and classroom management strategies. Realistically, you can’t always convince every single pupil that it is their jam but the huge majority of pupils are engaged
and excited to learn the ukulele. Reggie has devoted much time thinking up fun age-related activities, games and tasks that keep the pupils challenged and feeling happy that they have achieved something new each lesson. Pupils willingly put themselves forward to demonstrate skills throughout the lesson. This is because they are in an environment where they feel safe to fail and the learning format is predictable and comfortable. Reggie’s skills and expert knowledge of the intended progression map, together with his patience and understanding of all the components of what it takes to learn an instrument (for an extended amount of time), means that our pupils get the best experience of learning an instrument. Reggie is currently creating his own interactive ukulele scheme of work so is continually researching new methods of music teaching and luckily for us brings this enthusiasm into the classroom. The ukulele has proved to be a satisfying, playable musical instrument that provides an immediate pleasant sound (and totally bearable even when 30 pupils are practicing a task at the same time.) It is an instrument that is easy to hold and manipulate. Also, the ukulele is reasonably cheap (unlike a violin or trumpet which are also common WCET instruments) and a keen pupil can buy one to play at home quite easily which suit pupils from low-income families, who will not be able to afford 1:1 music lessons.
Byard is Music Lead at Edenbridge Primary School
I feel pupils who have had this initial experience of learning an instrument will be more likely to go on to learn other instruments in their lifetime, knowing they can do it, it is for them and it is in their skill set. I did hear a secondary music teacher voice concerns of why we choose the ukulele as a beginners instrument as apparently they have no use for ukuleles in their Year 7 junior band, which unfortunately for them wasn’t my main objective. Hopefully it might make a bit more sense now why primary music teachers love them and maybe Secondary schools could start up some more Year 7 ukulele ensembles as I’ve got several pupils who would like to join and that is why I am keeping the ukulele on our music curriculum.
Helen
BudgetFriendly Music
Dr Liz Stafford explores low-cost options for making music in your classroom
With school budgets under constant pressure, it can be a real challenge to effectively resource practical subjects like music. This can result in the curriculum narrowing down to be just singing and listening to music, or even not being taught altogether. But it doesn’t have to be this way! Instead of waiting for that halcyon day in the future when schools are funded adequately for all the things they have to do (I believe a pig-based fly-past is scheduled for that day!) you can still get stuck into music with these budget-friendly tips.
Use Everyday Objects:
Plastic bottles filled with rice, pasta, or lentils make excellent shakers.
Buckets, bins, and even table tops can serve as drums. Wooden spoons can be tapped together like claves. Mugs and teaspoons can simulate the sound of metallic instruments.
Use your bodies & voices:
Clapping, snapping, stomping, and patting different body parts can give you a palette of percussion sounds to rival any instrument collection.
Voices can make all kinds of sounds, not just ‘singing’ - add these to your body percussion sounds and you can create a piece of music with rich and varied timbres.
Use free online resources
BBC Ten Pieces offers lesson plans, videos, and music tracks to introduce classical music in an engaging way.
Chrome Music Lab provides interactive tools for teaching musical concepts.
YouTube features countless rhythm play-along videos and tutorials for classroom-friendly songs.
BBC Sounds offers a wide selection of music, including classical, world music, and educational programmes.
Spotify Free provides access to curated playlists for different moods and themes.
Classic FM has lots of great recordings and information about classical music.
Musopen offers free classical music recordings and sheet music for educational use
Other ideas
Organise instrument swaps with nearby schools, so you can all benefit from each others’ resources.
Seek funding opportunities from local community groups and arts organisations.
If you’re based in England, find out what your Music Hub are doing with their new capital grant funding - they may have plans for supporting schools with access to instruments
Elevate your teaching
Jodie Underhill introduces a new set of frameworks for teaching, learning, and assessment from the ISM Trust.
Over a decade ago, Dr Alison Daubney and Professor Martin Fautley, supported by the fledgling ISM Trust, the sister charity of the Independent Society of Musicians (ISM), created curriculum, pedagogy and assessment frameworks for delivering the National Curriculum in primary and secondary schools. Much has changed over time in music education and the 10th anniversary of the ISM Trust was the ideal time to revisit these documents and bring them up to date with the latest thinking.
The revised frameworks and accompanying wallcharts have been updated to be UK-wide – they can be used regardless of which curriculum teachers follow nationally – and are designed to help you plan and assess musical learning in your classroom. They can be used in a number of ways: for individual lessons, for medium-term planning, for long-term planning and supporting and evidencing children’s musical learning and development over time. They are constructed upon sound research-based principles and evidence into effective teaching, learning and assessment in music.
Perhaps most importantly they provide a framework that's designed to help you, your colleagues, and your senior leadership team think about what you want from music education, and how you might best achieve it within your own context.
Following an overview of music learning in the early years and primary schools, the framework then moves on to provide a guide for musical learning, assessment and progression. Musical learning in primary schools is often built around five key processes as main strands, which are interrelated and overlapping: singing, composing, improvising, playing and listening. In addition, there are three overarching themes which run throughout the processes: creativity, critical engagement and broader aspects of learning (for example. social, moral, spiritual, cultural, behaviours, values, attitudes, cooperation, and habits).
Dr Daubney and Professor Fautley present the strands of musical learning in the form of a spiral. This is important, as the notion of progression using a spiral means that pupils can go back and forth, up and
down, in three dimensions, and over time. The idea of a spiral curriculum is well established both generally, and in music education in particular (Bruner, 1960; Bruner, 1975; Thomas, 1970; Swanwick & Tillman, 1986; Charanga, 2015, British Journal of Music Education, Special Edition 2022) and spiral considerations can be very useful for curriculum development in music education, as well as for thinking about assessment and children’s musical progress.
The framework is then presented as a series of questions for teachers to address. From this, teachers can plan their own approaches to developing musical skills, knowledge and understanding alongside broader aspects of learning. These will be based upon topics, repertoire, curriculum materials as appropriate to the planning and teaching context of each school. Using singing as an example, the progression framework considers what singing skills you aim to develop (desired skills), how you are going to develop singing skills (approaches to developing skills), what knowledge and understanding of singing you are seeking to develop (desired knowledge and understanding) and how this knowledge and understanding of singing will be developed (approaches to developing knowledge and understanding).
The answers to these questions then feed into planning questions (Why is this important? Why is this important now? How does it link to where the pupils are in their learning journey?)
and deciding on curricula materials. The final stage of the framework is considering the assessment criteria and the method of assessment, for example, responding, creating and making, talking, exploring or notating.
Examples of possible assessment criteria statements across different stages of learning are also included which can be adapted to suit your school’s requirements and the different musical processes. These do not specifically relate to each other or to year groups or key stages in schools. They are intended to act as examples which can be graded using a variety of marking systems, such as ‘not yet able to’, ‘able to’, ‘confidently’; ‘working towards’, ‘working at’, ‘working beyond’; 'emerging’, ‘establishing’, ‘embedding’, ‘enhancing’; or whichever system your school uses. It is important to note that such summative assessment should only be undertaken periodically in music and not every lesson. Grades awarded should relate to a fairly substantial body of work from across a period of time.
We hope you find the revised documents useful and that there are ideas, provocations and suggestions within them that you can take and adapt to suit your own circumstances. They have been created by two leaders of music education who need little introduction.
worked across all ages and stages of music education and taught in a variety of mainstream and special educational settings. Alison has been actively involved in teacher education for many years and is an Honorary Senior Lecturer in Education at the University of Sussex. She holds a PhD from the University of Surrey. She has authored multiple books, materials and research reports including Teaching Primary Music published by SAGE, and the award-winning Primary Music Toolkit.
Martin is Emeritus Professor of Music Education at Birmingham City University. He has a wealth of experience in music education, both in terms of pedagogy and of music education research. For many years, he was a secondary music teacher, subsequently undertaking Doctoral research working in the education and music facilities at the University of Cambridge investigating the teaching, learning and assessment of classroom music making. In 2024 the ISM presented Martin with the prestigious Distinguished Musician Award.
The ISM is committed to supporting music teachers to deliver the best possible music education. We hope you find these new resources useful and share them with your networks. To download the frameworks for free and for more information please visit: ismtrust.org.
Alison has a portfolio career as a teacher, lecturer, researcher, workshop leader and author. She has Jodie Underhill is Research Associate at the Independent Society of Musicians
How to be a GREAT music subject leader
Dr Liz Stafford shares her advice
If you’re reading this magazine, then there’s a good chance that you have been given the responsibility for music in your school, whether willingly or otherwise! With great power comes great responsibility, and we know that music leaders always want to do their absolute best to develop and support their pupils’ musical ambitions. However, it can be difficult to know where to start, so here are some ideas for making the best of your role.
What is the role?
The music subject leader role varies in scope depending on where you are in the world. However, broadly speaking it will confer on you the responsibility for ensuring that the music curriculum is planned, delivered and assessed effectively. You may also be required to organise
maintain and promote an extracurricular programme, and / or represent your subject when your school is inspected. In England, the entire role is carried out mostly on goodwill, as there is no additional payment for subject leader responsibilities, which makes it tricky to definitively state what the requirements of the role are. You would get a very different answer to that question from a teaching union than you would from most Senior Leadership Teams, for example!
Preparing for the role
You can prepare for the role by developing your own musical knowledge, reading all the statutory and advisory government documents, developing your own pedagogical understanding, and building a support network.
In terms of your own musical knowledge, it would be useful to develop some basic skills in singing, playing the instruments that you use as part of your curriculum, analytical listening, and composing and improvising. It is also essential to develop your theoretical understanding of any terminology you will be using in your curriculum; for example, in England, the interrelated dimensions of music. If your curriculum requires you to teach a certain type of notation, then a basic understanding of note values and pitch placement will be really useful. And finally, a working understanding of key information on the styles, genres, traditions and periods of music that appear in your curriculum will be handy too. Although you may not be teaching the entire curriculum yourself, developing this level of musical knowledge will enable you to understand the curriculum fully, and confidently support other teachers to do the same. Not to mention be able to explain it to any unwelcome visitors who come to inspect you!
Each country has its own statutory and advisory guidance as regards the music curriculum. As music lead it is your job to find out what these are and make sure you have read and understand them. For example, in Wales this would include the Expressive Arts strand of the Curriculum for Wales, and the National Plan for Music Education in Wales. While you only have to worry about implementing statutory guidance, it’s always a good idea to
have at least read any advisory documents so you can decide if there is anything useful within them that you can use to enhance your own school’s music provision.
There’s often an assumption that if you come from a musical background that’s all you need to be able to teach music. However there is a huge gulf between subject understanding and pedagogical understanding in any subject, and as music lead it’s really important to understand best practice in the teaching of music. So whether you are a music ‘specialist’ or not, there is work to be done. If you’re a bookish sort of person, then reading texts by Keith Swanwick, John Paynter, Martin Fautley, and Ally Daubney would be a great starting point. And *cough-cough* you may have heard that I myself have written a book myself just for music leads; the Primary Music Leader’s Handbook!
If you’re looking for a more participatory style of learning then attending conferences and webinars or taking an online course would be good options. Just be careful that the opportunities that you pick are not sales pitches disguised as training; a lot of music CPD is methodologydriven and designed to convince you that the ‘only’ way to teach music is to purchase a particular resource. Look for opportunities which are research-informed, led by expert teachers, and discursive with plenty of opportunities to ask questions; be wary of anything that says you will
leave the session with a resource that will be the answer to all of your problems! (Another *cough-cough* moment here allows me to point out that I run a Primary Music Leadership Certificate programme which you might be interested in finding out more about!)
Music Leads are often the only person in their school who have knowledge of or interest in music, so it’s vital to build a support network beyond your school community to share ideas. If your school is part of a chain, multi-academy trust, or cluster, then you will have easy access to other music leads to share ideas. In England, your local Music Hub will most likely have a music lead network you can join, and may also offer other forms of CPD and support. Looking wider than this, there are many social media communities for music teachers, the most active of which are on Facebook. There is a Primary Music Subject Leads group which is well worth joining if you are not already a member.
Delivering the role
The first step for delivering your role successfully is to establish your strategic vision and create some kind of subject development plan. Start by thinking about what music in your school is ‘for’ and what you want your pupils to be able to do with music when they leave you. Then consider how you will make this happen and turn that into a step-by-step plan for developing your music provision.
This process will probably lead you to review your current curriculum, which in turn may result in you to having to source or design a curriculum & teaching resources. The key considerations for this process are to ensure compliance with the statutory guidelines in your country, ensure clear progression within and between year groups, and make sure that your assessment methods are embedded within the curriculum activities so teachers don’t have to work out how they’re going to carry out assessment on top.
If you have colleagues teaching their own music lessons, then you’ll need to support them to promote effective teaching and assessment. The ideal way to start is ask lots of questions, maybe in the form of a survey, about how teachers feel about music, and which areas they need support on, so that you can come up with a programme of targeted support. This might include booking music content for INSET sessions, including minitraining sessions in staff meetings, offering demonstration lessons or team-teaching opportunities, providing reading recommendations, or accessing training and support through the provider of the scheme of work you’re using in school. The main thing is to ensure that teachers feel supported and confident, otherwise music will gradually slip off the timetable altogether.
Most schools will want to offer at least one regular music extracurricular activity, plus the occasional performance or concert
involving music. Many schools go much further than this with weekly singing assemblies, choirs, instrumental tuition, workshops, and internal and external performances. This is without doubt the most timeconsuming part of the job, and you should ask for help if you need it. For example, there’s no reason why instrumental and vocal tutors can’t organise their own timetables and be responsible for fetching and returning pupils to and from lessons. If you have the budget, extra hours can be timetabled for these tutors so that they can also deliver an extracurricular club or ensemble, broadening your range of opportunities without adding extra workload for yourself. When it comes to performances, concerts and shows, you need to be very clear from the outset that these cannot be run effectively or safely by one person, and that you expect other colleagues, SLT, governors, and/or your Parent Teacher Association to be involved with these. With the right support, you can create a vibrant and varied programme of activities, across a range of musical styles and skills, without giving yourself a nervous breakdown in the process!
The role of a music subject leader is possibly the most challenging of all the subject leader roles in a primary school, but it is also the most rewarding. By preparing for and delivering the role effectively you can ensure that all your pupils are fulfilling their musical ambitions –what could be more satisfying than that?
Dr Liz Stafford is Director of Music Education Solutions®, Editor of Primary Music Magazine, and author of The Primary Music Leader’s Handbook.
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