Primary Music and Performing Arts

Intent

Performing Arts is a creative subject, encompassing both music and drama, in which all students are required to develop a cultural understanding of the Arts and how they can be applied. It is a vital element of education that not only requires students to use their imaginations and develop new skills, but endeavours to allow students to express views and opinions in a safe environment. For this to take place, students are encouraged to take risks, and work in groups to develop team work and critical responses, principals that can be reflected in all elements of education. A positive experience in the Performing Arts is therefore implicit to create empathetic students who are resilient and professional in performance situations. Through both the curriculum and the extended curriculum, we cover a wide range of topics, concepts and skills across the Arts which will allow all to achieve including those who are not performers, for example, in other technical aspects of Performing Arts. We aim to ensure that students can see how what they are learning can be applied to the wider world. Our Intent is to create cooperative, confident and ambitious students.

The power of music to engage young people in education, to motivate and excite them, to develop musical and transferable skills, also has a large body of empirical research. The national Curriculum draws upon this in its Purpose of Study.

Music maintains the status of a statutory subject and is an entitlement for all pupils up to the age of 14 in schools that must follow the National Curriculum. As a free school, we recognise the importance of music and want to ensure that our students experience a rich and balanced curriculum with good knowledge and skills. We have therefore chosen to invest in specialist teachers of music across all year groups in order that our students receive the best possible teaching of this subject.

Our curriculum has the inter-related processes of performing, composing, improvising, singing, creating, manipulating and combining to underpin the essentially practically nature of the subject. Composing, performing, listening and appraising are inter-related, meaning that, rather than being taught separately, they should be considered holistically. We also aim for our students to understand music in terms of culture, context, time and place. Along with voice, our students will learn to play and explore both tuned and non-tuned instruments including body percussion, tuned and untuned percussion, ukelele, recorder, fife and keyboard. They will also have the opportunity to learn a musical instrument through our peripatetic teaching programme.

Our Music curriculum is taught regularly across all Key Stages, including EYFS and into KS3, and it builds upon pupils’ experiences in and out of the classroom.

Being an all-through school has enabled us to have a range of choirs and an orchestra with students from both Primary and Secondary, having opportunities to sing and play together.

We want to celebrate the students’ achievements so we regularly share their success, whether that be through performing to others or sharing an exam success through LAMDA. We hold annual music concerts and all year groups from Year 1 to Year 6 do termly assemblies as well as Christmas shows and end of year shows.

We also have both a Junior and a Senior Primary choir and where possible we seek to perform with other Eastbourne schools.