It has five key pillars:
Inclusive and Aspirational:
The music curriculum is designed to introduce a wide range of musical experiences for everyone. Introducing styles and music ideas that are representative of a range of cultures and periods in history. The curriculum provides access for all students, regardless of demographics, to reading music, musical vocabulary, performing and experiencing and listening to the teacher and recordings of various musicians playing music. As well as making academic progress, students are also benefiting from enriching their cultural capital.
Foundational Literacy and Numeracy:
The music curriculum includes topic specific guided reading tasks to support the development of strong reading skills and musical knowledge. Music specific vocabulary is taught from the beginning of year 7 with students being encouraged to use topic specific vocabulary (including Italian terminology) throughout all their music lessons. The ability to count beats and understand rhythm also require numeracy knowledge and skills. Discussion of the work is part of the lessons to build on confidence in oracy. The curriculum is planned on Chromebooks and as a consequence there are high expectations of digital literacy, such as, basic grammar and punctuation (capital letters, spelling of specialist words, full stops).
Ambitious and Sequenced Learning:
Oakwood has recently been awarded Lead School status for Rotherham as part of the South Yorkshire Music Hub. This supports our vision of creating links between KS2 and other secondary schools across the Hub.
There are strong links with the Music Service and they inform the school about the students who play musical instruments to ensure a smooth transition that allows them to continue their musical education.
Baseline assessments are conducted as soon as the students start in Transition and include the key elements of listening and performance. This is to highlight students with prior knowledge in music and to identify more potential budding musicians. Music lessons are offered to all new students to further emphasise that access to playing music is available to all. As well as instrument lessons, singing lessons are offered.
The Music National Curriculum is used to plan lessons; all lessons are planned to build listening, composition and performance skills ready for a transition to KS4.
Cultivating Independent Learners:
Music actively encourages students to become resilient, reflective, and resourceful individuals who take ownership of their learning and embrace challenges with confidence. All topics in the music curriculum include a variety of supportive resources to encourage students to be resilient and resourceful when completing tasks. This includes vocabulary support, sentence starters, video demonstrations and regular modelling and demonstrating of tasks. Students are expected to use these resources to help them reach their potential in all tasks set. All students are encouraged to reflect and close the gap after receiving feedback from their teacher or peers to further support progress and acquisition of knowledge and skills.
Holistic Personal Development:
All students have the opportunity to be involved in a number of performances throughout the year including choir, orchestra and solo performance. These include performance opportunities in school and out in the community. We work closely alongside the Music Hub and other local organisations, for example, ROAR to bring industry professionals into the school to work alongside our students in a variety of workshops from, composition to performance to panels of professionals sharing their knowledge of the music industry. To stay current, electronic workshops have also been planned and delivered by external experts.
The department’s social media account is used to promote competitions, performance opportunities, work experience opportunities and to celebrate the work of our students.
