At Northern House Academy our Music curriculum is built around and underpinned by our School values. As such our approach is designed around understanding the needs of each individual child, is unapologetic in its high expectation, knowing that our children are not defined by their needs but instead viewed with the positivity they need in order to be nurtured both emotionally and academically, it is consistent in order to enable a safe environment where our pupils are empowered to take risks and experience success and it must be an Music curriculum that promotes the simple pleasure of happiness.
We understand that music is a universal language. One which is full of creativity, individuality and love. We designed our music curriculum so that it engages and inspires pupils to not just enjoy and develop a love of music, but also to explore their own talents as musicians and increase their self-confidence and creativity in the process. We base our music curriculum on the amazing online resource of Charanga which supports our pupils in having access to a world-leading music teaching and learning platform! As a staff we hope to pass on our enthusiasm for music and want all of our children to believe that they can achieve and that all people have musical ability.
As pupils progress through our music curriculum we teach them to apply critical thinking when analysing, listening or composing music. Our music curriculum is linked to our thematic approaches to learning and provides students with a deeper understanding of the topics they are learning about, and to illustrate the historical, political and cultural significance of music in relation to key events or topics throughout history. Charanga supports us in the delivery of this through matching up high quality music teaching learning to themes and topics!
Children are taught in mixed ability groups, and activities may be differentiated to support individual children’s needs. In addition to weekly Music lessons there are also many other opportunities for children to develop their musical abilities such as:
- Our link with St Edward’s where we have access to ‘Music as Therapy’ for our pupils on a weekly basis.
- Developing their singing through participation in our emerging school Choir and public performance opportunities.
- Break time and Lunch time playground music, where students musical tastes and interests are broadened via pupils and staff sharing and playing their favourite songs to one another.
- Our monthly ‘Band of the Month’ campaign where every class in the school listen to music from a wide range of genres and decide on their favourite songs!
To support our pupils developing knowledge we assess our pupils against National Curriculum Attainment Targets using the Northern House Academy ‘Learning Objective Descriptors’ and the sequential learning steps identified through Charanga. These help our teaching teams to choose learning objectives for our pupils that are well matched to their developing knowledge and enables progression of skills across and throughout our gallery and key stages within our academy.