Music
At Sikh Heritage Girls School, our music curriculum provides all pupils with a high-quality music education that engages and inspires them to develop a love for music while nurturing their talents as musicians. Through our programme, students build self-confidence, creativity, and a deep sense of achievement. Our approach fosters a critical engagement with music, enabling pupils to perform, compose, and appraise with confidence.
As musicians, our students follow a carefully structured ‘Spiral Music Curriculum,’ ensuring a progressive development of skills and a rich, immersive musical experience. We are proud to work in partnership with Slough Music Trust and are actively working towards achieving the prestigious Music Mark Award.
Our specialist music teacher leads engaging lessons, including weekly violin sessions and termly workshops that introduce students to diverse musical traditions. These workshops feature exciting experiences such as Brazilian samba and djembe drumming. We are particularly excited to be embarking on a graded Kirtan Saaj learning journey, where all students will receive weekly Dilruba lessons, deepening their connection to Sikh musical heritage.
Music Curriculum Intent
In terms of ensuring equity and promoting daily meaningful progress, by the end of Year 6, our music curriculum will have instilled inquisitive and knowledgeable appreciators of a diverse range of musical styles. Most importantly, our pupils will have the cultural confidence to respond in a personal way to music, using the language of appreciation. They recognise the joy of performance and sharing this experience with an audience, whilst developing communication and building resilience; both invaluable qualities for secondary education and for future adult life.
The progressive layering of knowledge, embedded in long-term memory, scaffolds pupils to:
Develop the essential characteristics of a musician
Build a rapidly widening repertoire which they use to create original, imaginative, fluent and distinctive composing and performance work.
Increase musical understanding underpinned by high levels of aural perception, internalisation and knowledge of music, including high or rapidly developing levels of technical expertise.
Develop awareness and appreciation of different musical traditions and genres.
Understand how musical provenance – the historical, social and cultural origins of music – contributes to the diversity of musical styles.
Use musical terminology effectively, accurately and appropriately.
Develop a passion for and commitment to, a diverse range of musical activities.
Application of Conceptual Understanding – occurs when new information and ideas are incorporated into pupils’ existing knowledge through:
Appreciating a range of composers and their compositions
Identifying similarities and differences between composers and their works
Knowing about great composers and musicians and understanding the historical and cultural development of their works.
Nurturing a genuine interest in the subject and an ability to evaluate their own and others’ performances and composition
Music Implementation
To achieve our intent, our Music curriculum will provide the following:
Fortnightly lessons from Year 1 upwards
Music topics that are progressively sequenced and spaced so that pupils organise their knowledge, skills and understanding around the following learning concepts: Perform – understand that music is created to perform; Compose – appreciating that music is created through a process which has a number of techniques; Transcribe – understand that compositions need to be understood by others and that there are techniques and a language for communicating them: Describe – appreciating the features and effectiveness of musical elements
At each Key Stage, a wide range of content ensures that children get a rich learning experience covering all aspects of music.
A clear progression of skills and knowledge to accompany each unit, setting out exactly how the children progress throughout the year and year on year.
Children given the opportunity to learn to play musical instruments as part of the curriculum.
Music Curriculum Impact
Pupils develop a love of music
Pupils understand a wide range of musical vocabulary and use it with precision
They develop an increased understanding of the impact that music can have on their own and others’ lives
Pupils are able to demonstrate the progression of knowledge and skills which they continuously build on and embed
They develop resilience, and communication skills and take creative risks
Pupils develop an understanding of history and culture through studying musicians from different traditions along with great musicians and composers