Intent

Learning music is a vital part of a rich and rounded curriculum. Opportunities to play musical instruments, sing and make music together, supports a child’s development by nurturing language, motor and collaboration skills. 

Our principal aim is that children leave Oakdale Primary School with a range of happy and rich memories in Music formed through exciting experiences ensuring that children see learning in music as an ongoing process, not a one-off event. Our intention is that all children gain an interest, a secure understanding and enjoyment of music in its many forms. This is achieved through the threshold concepts of: performing, composing, listening, transcribing and describing music, across a wide variety of musical genres. These experiences aim to develop a love of music and increase our children’s self-confidence, creativity, and sense of achievement. We use Music Express alongside our progressive curriculum, from EYFS through to year 6, to encourage high aspirations for performances and compositions from an early age. 

The curriculum is designed to enable all children to: 

• Play and perform in solo and ensemble contexts, using voice and playing instruments with increasing accuracy, control and expression. 
• 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 opportunities to learn to play a musical instrument through a ‘first access’ programme by learning the ocarina in Year 1; the recorder in Years 3 and Year 5; Samba drumming tuition in Year 4 from external providers, enabling 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, tempo, timbre, texture, structure and appropriate musical notations. 

Implementation

Our Music curriculum has developed the repeated use of the threshold concepts of: Perform (understanding that music is created to be performed); Compose (appreciating that music is created through a process which has a number of techniques); Transcribe (understanding that compositions need to be understood by others and that there are techniques and a language for communicating them) and Describe music (appreciating the features and effectiveness of musical elements) in each year group. Thereby, all pupils progress through their understanding of them. The Essentials Curriculum sets out this progression in the form of three ‘Milestones’. Each Milestone contains a range of descriptors which give more detail to be discovered within the concept. Over a two-year period, students will become more and more familiar with these details by exploring them in a breadth of contexts.​  

Assessment

Points of assessment, linked to the threshold concepts and milestones, are identified in each unit of work across Key Stage one and two for each pupil. Each class teacher will assess all pupils at the end of each unit. In addition, we encourage self-assessment by the students to evaluate their own understanding, and develop their skills further.