Our Vision for Music at Brixworth Primary School

At Brixworth Primary School, we envisage that every child who leaves our school will be engaged and inspired with a developing love of music. Our learners will develop their musical knowledge and understanding through our Musical Key Concepts: 

• Performing - This concept involves understanding how to present performances through controlling sounds by singing and playing effectively with the awareness of audience, venue and occasion. It allows our children to work collaboratively to develop a love of music through increasing their self-confidence, creativity and sense of achievement. This enables children to be proud and confident about who they are, as well practise their learning behaviour of being resilient and reflective when mastering how to perform and articulate how and why differences occur.

• Listening - This concept involves appreciating the features and effectiveness of musical elements through listening and appraising. This encourages children to respond to their thoughts, but also look beyond Brixworth and the UK to develop an understanding and respect for the culture of music across the world. Therefore, our children can recognise and identify instruments from different genres, cultures and traditions, comparing and contrasting them with their own musical practices and experiences.

• Composing- This concept involves appreciating that music is created through a process which has a number of techniques to create simple and complex structures, produced by either a pattern of sounds, singing or playing instruments. It allows our children at Brixworth to have a sense of belonging to the school and community through the contribution of collaborative class compositions.

• History of Music (KS2 only) - This concept involves recognising and discussing stylistic features of different genres, styles, eras and traditions of music. Our children will explore a different range of songs from around the world to develop their sense of global citizenship and to develop an awe and wonder about life.

• Dimensions of Music - The inter-related dimensions of music concept flows through all the other Key Concepts. These are the elements or building blocks of Music: pitch, duration, dynamics, tempo, timbre, texture, structure and notation.

The whole school music curriculum is predominantly taught through the ‘Kapow’ scheme, which ensures pupils are exposed to a range of music from different times and cultures and there is a key pathway of progressive skills across each year group. Alongside the core scheme that we follow, we are always seeking ways of enhancing our core termly topics through all subject areas. If we can find a meaningful link, that enhances pupils’ skills, we will ensure this is planned for each term. 

The extra-curricular musical life at the school is also significant and we are incredibly proud of the large percentage of children who either learn an instrument or are involved in an extra-curricular musical activity.  We have a number of gifted and talented musicians who not only learn their instruments through NMPAT but are also members of the NMPAT County Groups. 

Each year we are also involved in First Access project offered by NMPAT:
'The government tell us this in ‘The Importance of Music (DFE 2011 – The National Plan)’. To support this aspiration, NMPAT is devolving £310,000 of government money to schools as a grant to enable every child to have a First Access experience during their primary school experience.

Through this project pupils in lower KS2 have had the opportunity over the years to be involved in either whole class guitar tuition or samba workshops. Their skills have been celebrated and shared at the end of this term with performances provided to parents and families as well as the whole school community.

Our KS1 and KS2 choirs have also increased in numbers over the years with currently over 100 children attending each week in KS2. Performances throughout the year have included visiting the local residential care homes where we recognise the importance of our involvement within the community. The choir has also performed at the Brixworth Music Festival, the Brixworth Community Church Outdoor Nativity, as well as attending the mass choir ‘Young Voices’ experience each year.