“Music gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination and life to everything.”

~Plato

At Compass Primary Academy, we deliver a high quality music education that will engage and inspire pupils to develop a love of music and their talent as musicians. We do so to increase their self-confidence, creativity and sense of achievement. As pupils progress, we aim that they develop a critical engagement with music, allowing them to compose, and to listen with discrimination to the best in the musical canon. To ensure this, we have designed and implemented a curriculum in collaboration with the National Curriculum with support from Northamptonshire Music and Performing Arts Trust (NMPAT).  

Aims: 

Our curriculum ensures all pupils:

• 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 curriculum is centred around Sing Up (https://www.singup.org/), a music-based scheme which is designed to progressively develop children’s musical skills.

In KS1 children will be taught to:

• Use their voices expressively and creatively by singing songs and speaking chants and rhymes
• Play tuned and untuned instruments musically
• Listen with concentration and understanding to a range of high quality live and recorded music
• Experiment with, create, select and combine sounds using the inter-related dimensions of music 

In KS2 children will be taught to:

• Sing and play musically with increasing confidence and control
• Develop an understanding of musical composition, organising and manipulating ideas within musical structures and reproducing sounds from aural memory
• Play and perform in solo and ensemble contexts, using their voices and playing musical instruments with increasing accuracy, fluency, control and expression
• Improvise and compose music for a range of purposes using the inter-related dimensions of music
• Listen with attention to detail and recall sounds with increasing aural memory  
• Use and understand staff and other musical notations  
• Appreciate and understand a wide range of high-quality live and recorded music drawn from different traditions and from great composers and musicians  
• Develop an understanding of the history of music

The music skills taught in each year group are reinforced and built upon throughout the scheme. Children in Year 1 will participate in Let's Sing projects and children in Year 3 will also learn to play the recorder during their class music lessons within the spring/summer term. This is delivered through NMPAT. 

To further expose children to a wealth of artists, instruments and songs/pieces of music, we have weekly assemblies where the children listen and appraise music within their classes.