Music

Our Curriculum Intent for Music

Click here for our Music Policy 2025

 At Avening Primary School, we believe that music enriches the lives of people. Music is a unique way of communicating that can inspire creativity, personal development and motivation. It is a vehicle for personal expression and plays an important part in helping children feel part of a community. Music is an important entitlement to all children at Avening Primary School. We provide opportunities for all children to create, play, perform and enjoy music, to develop the skills to appreciate a wide variety of musical forms, and to begin to make judgements about the quality of music.

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

‘Music is a universal language that embodies one of the highest forms of creativity. A high quality music education should engage and inspire pupils to develop a love of music and their talent as musicians, and so increase their self-confidence, creativity and sense of achievement. As pupils progress, they should develop a critical engagement with music, allowing them to compose, and to listen with discrimination to the best in the musical canon.’(National Curriculum in England, September 2013)

 Our overarching aim for Music is to promote a high level of understanding of skills and knowledge.   

 In line with the National Curriculum, we aim to ensure that all children:

•  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.

The Music curriculum at Avening Primary School is built around the statutory content of the 2014 National Curriculum and the Early Years Foundation Stage Curriculum. Music is a foundation subject; the National Curriculum programmes of study require children to be taught to sing and play musically with increasing confidence and control. By the end of Key Stage 2, they should have the opportunity to develop an understanding of musical composition, organising and manipulating ideas within musical structures and reproducing sounds from aural memory.

At our school, we use Charanga as the core of our scheme of work for the Early Years Foundation Stage. From Year 1, we use Oak National Academy as our core scheme of work, supplemented with Charanga and whole class musical tuition. 

Our curriculum develops pupils as musicians, fostering a deeper understanding of the subject as a platform for a lifelong connection with music. Through performance, composition and engaged listening, pupils develop their musicianship and experience a diverse range of musicians and styles, enable them to embrace creativity and expression and build their understanding of and confidence in making music both individually and with others. Oak National Academy resources ensures that our curriculum is knowledge and vocabulary rich, sequenced and coherent, evidence-informed, diverse and accessible.

Curriculum Coherence

Six threads signpost groups of units that link to one another, that together build a common body of knowledge over time. We use these threads as our 'learning lenses' for assessment. 

Our threads are:

• Developing our singing voice
• Playing together in an ensemble
• Practising and preparing for a performance
• Creating, composing and improvising
• Notating and sharing music
• Music over time and in different places - covered in each unit.

In Years 5 and 6,  whole class woodwind tuition with a peripatetic specialist is offered to all children in the summer term.

Music is taught weekly, with classes having approximately 1 hour or music each week from Year 1.

Early Years Foundation Stage

In EYFS, music is a regular feature of the school day, with singing, rhymes and lessons each week. 

Within the Early Years Foundation Stage, the specific area of 'Expressive Arts and Design' encompasses a range of early music skills and knowledge. 

This involves enabling children to explore and play with a wide range of media and materials, as well as providing opportunities and encouragement for sharing their thoughts, ideas and feelings through a variety of activities in art, music, movement, dance, role-play, and design and technology.

Music reflects the three characteristics of effective teaching and learning in the Early Years Foundation Stage.

• playing and exploring - children investigate and experience things, and 'have a go'
• active learning - children concentrate and keep on trying if they encounter difficulties, and enjoy achievements
• creating and thinking critically - children have and develop their own ideas, make links between ideas, and develop their strategies for doing things

Provision in the EYFA is resources and facilitated to ensure that opportunities for early musical skills and knowledge are developed.

Within objective-led tasks, children are encouraged to build a repertoire of songs and dances, as well as explore different sounds of instruments. 

An overview of our Music Curriculum can be accessed here. 

At Avening Primary School, Music is a key areas for enrichment and we encourage as many children as possible to take part in musical activities outside of music lessons. 

The Young Voices performance in Birmingham is also a highlight for our singers, seeing children performing in the world's largest children's choir - something we see an as important offer in a small school. Children eligible for the pupil premium are always offered a space on this exciting experience. 

As part of our peripatetic offer, we have guitar, violin and piano teachers providing lessons. In addition, as Avening has a brass band, a member of the band runs a club open to all children in Key Stage 2. We also have iRock taking weekly sessions for budding rockstars. The bands perform to the school each term. Bursary places are avaiable.

Extra-curricular opportunities include a Young Voices club, recorders and ukulele.

The culmination of our work in music is our annual Musical Soiree which sees children perform on their instruments and singing. 

Enrichment

In addition to the cultural enrichment opportunities identified on the scheme of work, an ecletic programme of music is introduced to the children during assemblies, with powerpoint slides about the genre or composer. The music often supports the value in focus, the time of year, or a subject being studied by the children. Recent choices have included folk music by Jonas and Harbottle - The Headscarf Revolutionaries, Vaughan Williams's 'The Lark Ascending', Allegri's Miserere and 'Lean on Me' by Bill Withers. The children have regular opportunities to hear Handel's Messiah, as well as other significant composers. 

Every year, all children take part in a whole school musical. In EYFS and Key Stage 1, this is a nativity; in Key Stage 2, a commercial musical is used. This see all children sing in a group and perform to an audience, with opportunities for solo performances in all Key Stages, as well as percussion accompaniments. 

Enrichment opportunities are also important part of our musical offer, with children visiting the theatre (in 2025-2026 to The Old Vic and to The Royal Shakespeare Theatre) as well as musical recitals, such as from concert pianist, Clare Hammond, who visited us in April 2026.