Music

Intent

At Betty Layward Primary School, we value our high-quality music curriculum that promotes creativity. A broad, accessible music education, allows children to thrive through performing, listening, composing and singing. Music at Betty Layward allows children to be engaged and inspire them to develop a love for music. It is an opportunity for children to develop their talent as musicians and to increase their self-confidence, creativity and sense of achievement. Our curriculum at Betty Layward is for children to understand musical concepts through the exploration of a variety of styles and periods throughout musical history.

Our music curriculum develops the important characteristics of musicians:

• perform, listen to, review and evaluate music across a range of historical periods, genres, styles and traditions, including the works of the great composers and musicians
• learn to sing and to use their voices, to create and compose music on their own and with others, have the opportunity to learn a musical instrument, use technology appropriately and have the opportunity to progress to the next level of musical excellence
• understand and explore how music is created, produced and communicated, including through the inter-related dimensions: pitch, duration, dynamics, tempo, timbre, texture, structure and appropriate musical notations.

Implementation

Our Music curriculum is designed to help pupils form knowledge within their long term memories to enable them to become musicians.

The Betty Layward Music curriculum provides a starting point where every young person should be able to experience music and to make progress. It is founded on the belief that music enriches individual lives as well as the school’s wider community.

To ensure that all children have the potential to access the curriculum, we have organised musical knowledge into a schema. This allows the children to revisit the Big Ideas and key concepts that create musicians.

These Big Ideas and key concepts include:

• Listening
• Performing
• Singing
• Composition
• Musicianship

Impact

Outcomes in Music are evident as the children at Betty Layward progress throughout their school career. The repetition of the Big Ideas and key concepts assess the musical knowledge that they have embedded in their long-term memory. Using this knowledge, the children can progress to more advance concepts to build their musicianship skills in Listening, Performing, Singing and Composing.