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Music in the Primary National Curriculum by Dr Mark Betteney The national curriculum was heralded as a knowledge-based document, but how much knowledge is contained in the primary national curriculum for music?
Amongst many primary and Early Years teachers lurk insecurities regarding the teaching of music. Unless they are confident in their music subject knowledge, for many primary school teachers and Early Years practitioners the first question is not so much ‘how’ to teach music, but ‘whether’ to teach music. This binary choice is a possibility because it is common practice for specialist music teachers to deliver the music curriculum while teachers undertake their planning and preparation time, and although for perhaps fifteen years this has been a successful way of organising release time for teachers, the process has had two damaging consequences regarding the teaching and learning of music. The first is that it reinforces widely held beliefs that to teach music one must be a specialist, and to learn it one must be gifted. The second consequence is that it separates music from the rest of the curriculum, both in the eyes of teachers, and of the children. One of the problems for non-specialist teachers of music is the nebulous nature of music in the National Curriculum (DfE 2013). In that document, only two pages are dedicated to the subject, and the targets for KS1 and KS2, both contained within a single side of A4, include direction such as ‘Children should be taught to play tuned and untuned instruments musically’ (DfE, 2013:258, KS1) and to ‘improvise and compose music for a range of purposes’ (DfE, 2013:258, KS2). How these things might be taught, or what specifically needs to be learnt is not disclosed. There is none of the prescription inherent in the guidance surrounding the teaching of mathematics or phonics. This is a blessing for the music specialist, but not for the teacher who would welcome help and direction.
PrimaryFirst
The national curriculum (2013) was published with a fanfare of commitment to subject knowledge. Across the board it was to be a transformative knowledgebased curriculum. Consider these excerpts from speeches by prominent drivers of education policy around that time. “What is to be criticised [in the previous curriculum] is an education system which has relegated the importance of knowledge in favour of ill-defined learning skills”. (Hon. Nick Gibb, Schools Minister, 1st July 2010) “Our new curriculum affirms - at every point - the critical importance of knowledge acquisition”. (Rt. Hon. Michael Gove, Secretary of State for Education, 5th February 2013) “At the heart of our reforms has been a determination to place knowledge back at the core of what pupils learn in school. For too long our education system prized the development of skills above core knowledge” (Rt. Hon. Nicky Morgan, Secretary of State for Education, 27th January 2015). It is perhaps this commitment to knowledge that is a stumbling block for non-specialist teachers. Atkinson (2018) is interesting in her response to this. Exploring non-specialist teachers’ first priorities to teaching music as she asks, “which parts of the curriculum treat ‘music’ more as a noun and which ones treat it as more of a verb?” (Atkinson, 2018:11). This is a question that could be transformative to how nervous but willing nonspecialist teachers see their role in embracing music. In Atkinson’s (2018) view, if a teacher tries to teach ‘music, the noun’, the emphasis is on a product, or an outcome. If a teacher tries to teach ‘music, the verb’, the emphasis is on an experience, or involvement in
