INTENT
At Southway, we aspire to inspire and ignite a life-love of music in every pupil through immersion in a wide range of high quality musical experiences. We understand that a creative, collaborative, interactive musical educational has numerous invaluable and life-enhancing benefits: physical, psychological, social, and educational. Music is deliberately interwoven into the fabric of school life across the academic year – at the individual, class, year group and whole school levels – bringing our community together, while actively championing our school values. Children learn resilience in overcoming musical and instrumental challenges, practise kindness and respect in ensemble rehearsals, and reap the rewards of teamwork through the shared experience and joy of performance. Our philosophy of music education also dovetails Southway’s overarching vision of interactive, inside-out and independent learning, intending to provide multiple meaningful opportunities for hands-on, exploratory, child-led music making.
Our vision is for all pupils to leave primary school having had multiple opportunities to:
- Listen to and gain a deeper critical appreciation of music across a wide range of periods, traditions and styles
- Be inducted into the powerful cultural knowledge associated with famous and celebrated works of great composers and musicians
- Sing regularly in social settings, learning to control their voice with increasing confidence, precision and purpose
- Learn a variety of musical instruments with increasing accuracy, fluency, control and expression
- Express themselves and discover their creative potential through composing and improvising original music
- Develop their performing skills, in solo and ensemble contexts, and for a range of audiences
- Explore and understand how music is created, produced and communicated through the interrelated musical dimensions: pitch, duration, dynamics, tempo, timbre, texture, structure and appropriate musical notation
- Be equipped with the correct technical terminology to accurately and insightfully respond to, discuss and analyse music
The starting point for music lessons at Southway is our end of year expectations, which have been written to ensure coverage of the National Curriculum, following the guidance of the Model Music Curriculum. Progression across the school is planned to ensure children’s knowledge, understanding and skills pertaining to the key inter-related musical dimensions continuously develop and deepen. Music-making is also harnessed to provide meaningful opportunities for children to practise kindness and respect, strengthen their resilience and continuously hone teamwork skills. Our differentiated, spiral curriculum draws on Charanga’s award-winning, research-based scheme of work. Placing appreciation of a diverse variety of songs at the heart of each lesson, students revisit existing knowledge and skills, before extending them incrementally. In this manner, learning is consolidated and augmented, with consistent and appropriate challenge providing differentiated pathways for pupils to progressively build musical confidence and technical understanding.
Musical learning begins with the voice, and throughout our curriculum children develop their musicianship through singing activities that offer increasing levels of challenge and complexity. Singing is also an integral part of school life outside the classroom, where weekly singing assemblies offer whole-school vocal tuition that directly links Sing Up’s extensive library of songs to our own school values. All children also have access to a range of instruments when improvising, composing and practising their recall skills. Years 3 and 4 enjoy whole-class ensemble tuition on both the recorder and violin from a visiting music teacher for a full term, culminating in live performances. Optional private instrumental tuition includes violin and guitar, with lessons conducted in our dedicated music classroom, The Mozart.
At Southway, extracurricular events and opportunities enrich the musical experience of each child while strengthening our shared bonds. Southway’s Choral Day is a joyous, whole-school celebration of singing, offering vocal coaching from a renowned conductor of some of the country’s most prestigious choirs. In addition to our community Carol Concert performances, termly class assemblies and a full-length musical production provide individual year groups with further opportunities to perform in front of the whole school. Southway’s ever-popular school choir has a membership that exceeds one-quarter of all pupils and provides exciting opportunities to perform both in London’s O2 Arena with Young Voices and within the local community. In response to pupil voice, this year has also seen the launch of a ukulele ensemble and World Music Club.
