Music Teacher May 20151

KS5KS3

Jane Werry is a specialist leader in education, and director of music at Hayes School in Bromley. She is an A level moderator for OCR, and a regular contributor to Music Teacher online resources.

Building a KS3 curriculum

by Jane Werry

IntroductIon

Building a curriculum for your KS3 students is an activity fraught with choices. And from choices come

uncertainties, and nearly always worries that you are doing the right thing. Like many school-based worries,

these ultimately spring from Ofsted’s ‘Sword of Damocles’.

Ofsted has repeatedly offered reassurance that there are many right ways to teach music, and that the content

of any school-devised curriculum is up to each institution to decide, based on its ethos and intake. What it

does not do, however, is offer any answers to questions such as: ‘What should be included?’ With such an

embarrassment of choices on offer, the teacher can feel as though they don’t know where to start.

Here, I intend to offer some guidance through the pitfalls and opportunities that are involved in devising a KS3

curriculum. I hope it will enable you to consider all angles and arrive at a two- or three-year programme that

does all the things you want it to, while fulfilling the needs of your own pedagogical ideals, your school’s ethos,

and your students. To start with, there will be many more questions than answers. But gradually I will introduce

examples from my own practice that I hope will help inform your decisions, even if yours are ultimately very

different from mine.

Start wIth a Swot analySIS

There is a plethora of questions that need to be considered before you can begin to put together your ideal

KS3 curriculum, and each department’s answers will be very different. Whether you are devising a KS3 music

curriculum as a solo enterprise, as a head of department or teacher in charge at KS3, or whether you are doing

it collaboratively as a department, an analysis of the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats that

characterise your situation is a good starting point.

A large piece of paper divided into quadrants is useful here. You will notice that the same prompts feature in

strengths and weaknesses, and in opportunities and threats – it is likely that one department’s strength will be

another’s weakness. There will be other relevant points to include, but this is a starting point:

Music Teacher May 2015 2

Str

eng

ths

y Particular musical (performing, composing, theory) skills of members of staff

y Pedagogical expertise of staff y resources in the department (rooms and other

equipment) y Support from senior managers (particularly with

regard to the understanding they have of the way that music works, and the freedoms they allow)

y attitudes of students y curriculum time devoted to music, and organisation

of the timetable y assessment practices O

pp

ort

un

itie

s

y available training or opportunities to collaborate with other music teachers

y Partnerships with the local music hub or other musical organisation

y Funding for new resources y using existing technology in new/useful/exciting

ways y cross-curricular projects y changes to curriculum time/organisation y Senior leadership open to ideas and change y Student voice

Wea

knes

ses

y Particular musical (performing, composing, theory) skills of members of staff

y Pedagogical expertise of staff y resources in the department (rooms and other

equipment) y Support from senior managers (particularly with

regard to the understanding they have of the way that music works, and the freedoms they allow)

y attitudes of students y curriculum time devoted to music, and organisation

of the timetable y assessment practices T

hre

ats

y available training or opportunities to collaborate with other music teachers

y Partnerships with the local music hub or other musical organisation

y Funding for new resources y using existing technology in new/useful/exciting

ways y cross-curricular projects y changes to curriculum time/organisation y Senior leadership not open to ideas and change y Student voice

Once your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats are identified, the construction of your KS3

curriculum needs to make full advantage of strengths and opportunities, and minimise weaknesses and

threats as far as possible.

PedagogIcal and cultural decISIonS

As if this wasn’t juggling enough balls, there are plenty more considerations to be borne in mind. Not many

subjects suffer from the same existential problems that music does: we constantly seem to be asking ‘What is

music education?’, ‘What is music education for?’ and ‘Who decides what is good and what is not?’.

Your KS3 curriculum, and how you deliver it, will depend on a number of pedagogical and cultural decisions.

With many of these, there are no simple yes or no answers, but it will help to identify where you are on a sliding

scale between one viewpoint and another. Let’s consider a few of these decisions:

This is a big question, and construction of a curriculum requires that you give it some careful thought. The

issues as I see them are these:

� there are some excellent models (particularly in australia) of single-genre music curricula, mostly based on

rock and pop. this may or may not suit your skills, but more to the point you may feel a duty to provide your

students with some ‘cultural capital’.

� cultural capital refers to acquiring knowledge of the achievements of civilisation to date – in other words,

knowing about the range of music that has been composed and performed through history and around the

world. having this knowledge is seen as part of each child’s ‘cultural and intellectual inheritance’, and, as

such, is an egalitarian, not elitist, concept: everyone has the same ability to acquire knowledge, and knowing

about the things that other people know about is an important part of being equal with them.

If training and opportunities for collaboration are not forthcoming – especially if you are a solo music teacher in a school – do take advantage of the many online sources of information that exist. Twitter and Facebook (through the KS3 Music Hints & Tips group) are a good start, but don’t miss Teachtalkmusic and Music Mark’s peer-to-peer network as invaluable networking spaces and sources of up-to-date information and ideas.

3 Music Teacher May 2015

� there is undeniably a gulf between students’ own musical lives (what they listen to at home, the music they

may create themselves) and music lessons at school. do you want to bridge that gulf? where is there a point

at which you can meet?

� using the students’ own musical experiences and preferences can certainly act as a motivator. are you

going to use this as a starting point, to hook students in, and then take them somewhere new? or will you

continue to build their skills within the genres with which they are comfortable from the start?

� the cultural capital idea has, at its logical extreme, the ‘genre tour’, where students are taken on a whistle-

stop journey through styles, periods, and places. at its worst, this is shallow and perfunctory, resulting in little

of real musical or educational value. we will return to this problem separately.

To what extent do you see yourself as the person in the room who knows/can do it, leading those who don’t

to a place where they do/can? Allied to this question is the desire to get all involved – teacher and students

alike – thinking and behaving like musicians. There are some teachers who – mentally or explicitly – divide their

students into ‘musicians’ and ‘non-musicians’. Are you one of them? What value will you place on students’

own musical creations? How open will you be to outcomes that are unexpected? How much margin for going

‘off-piste’ will you allow in composing activities – will you allow just a couple of variables, or make tasks truly

open-ended?

We can break down this question further into these areas:

� If you decide that an element of cultural capital is important to you, then the question of what to include and

what to leave out becomes even more difficult than it might have been before. this brings into sharp relief

the issue of exactly how much room there is for different topics: will you have one every half term, or give

yourself more opportunity for students to gain some mastery by having longer topics?

� are there particular genres that are ‘must-haves’ for building cultural capital – perhaps that are pertinent to

your intake? If, for example, your school has a large proportion of asian students, should you include asian

musical genres that fit with their heritage? If so, how do you find out what they already know about it? what

if your knowledge and skills do not match up to theirs? are your cultural ‘must-haves’ dictated by your own

musical experiences and background?

� does it even matter what genres are studied? does music need the context of a genre to make sense?

would it be possible to teach musical skills and knowledge without reference to a genre? how much weight

will you give to the cultural context of the music that is studied?

� will there be overriding skills, knowledge or themes that recur, or interleave through the different units in

your curriculum? If so, what will these be? Much has been written about Keith Swanwick’s ‘spiral curriculum’

(for an overview see Jason Kubelius’s blog here). Indeed, there needs to be some element of revisiting

musical skills and ideas to consolidate, and to make the point that these things are transferable between

one type of music and another. Benjamin Bloom (of taxonomy fame) wrote about mastery learning, where

essential skills and concepts are identified and then taught through an initial instructional phase, followed

by formative assessment, and then either correctional work or extension, depending on where students are.

this seems like a useful way of thinking about what we are doing – perhaps more so than Swanwick’s spiral.

we will return to mastery learning later.

Musical knowledge can be fairly easily divided into ‘knowledge about music’ (a minim has two beats, Beethoven

wrote nine symphonies) and ‘knowledge of music’ (having a real understanding of how music works, usually

from direct experience of making music). One thing that Ofsted has been pretty clear on in recent years is that

knowledge of music trumps knowledge about music, and it seems to make sense – there is absolutely no point

in knowing that a minim has two beats unless you are going to play one.

4Music Teacher May 2015

But how much time and energy should you devote to knowledge about music? Do you need any at all? What is

the place of musical terminology in all of this? What should students write down, if anything? Should knowledge

about music serve only to support the knowledge of music? What about understanding context? Is it necessary

to include written work in music lessons to make music a ‘real’ subject that has status alongside other subjects?

Martin Fautley, in his blog here, puts it eloquently: when the writing starts, the music stops. We must bear this

in mind when planning our KS3 curricula.

Your response to this question may well depend on the resources available, together with your school’s stance

on students using their own devices in lessons. The extent of your own knowledge and experience of techy

music making may well also play a part.

If practical considerations are not all-consuming, you have a choice to make concerning the importance

you place on ‘real’ music making. Do you think it matters if students cannot play in time, as long as they can

quantise? You could argue either way, or attempt to strike a balance between the two worlds. My own feeling is

that using technology really suits some projects, and enables creative and conceptual ideas to take shape that

are beyond what is possible in a practical sphere. But much of the time, I want my students to sing together,

and interact using instruments, acquiring tactile, real-time musical skills.

So far, I have asked far more questions than I have answered. I feel at this stage that I ought to provide an example, to illustrate one possible solution to this smorgasbord of enquiry.

At Hayes School, we decided that cultural capital was important to us, but that we wanted to avoid a genre tour that had more breadth than depth. We also decided that we wanted to introduce a certain amount of cultural context to the styles we were studying, but without doing unnecessary amounts of writing or listening in precious lesson time.

We devised workbooks for students, which are spaces for notes and assessment details. They do not contain written work that is marked: they are places to make notes of what has happened in lessons, to prevent work being forgotten from one lesson to the next, and record key terminology that we use when we are talking about our work. Visitors to lessons (and anybody who has thoughts of doing anything like a ‘book look’) are reminded that this is not where the music is – there are recordings for that purpose. There is an example of one of our workbooks here.

For each topic – and we do one topic per term (with a one-hour lesson each week) – we do a homework project that involves a lot of the contextual detail and listening. This gives us an opportunity to cover some meaty historical/cultural content, encouraging research skills among our students, and having the handy side effect of giving us evidence of marking students’ spelling, punctuation and grammar. Completing this part of the course outside of lessons leaves our precious curriculum time for more practical activities. For an example of our homework tasks, see the one that goes with our Year 8 12-bar blues project here. The downside is that the marking is very time-consuming – it is absolutely crucial to stagger the setting (and collection) of such homework tasks.

An example of a project that is enhanced by using music technology is a songwriting project that I do with my Year 9 students. The starting point involves devising an eight-bar chord sequence, and then experimenting with figuration, before writing lyrics and adding a vocal line. Students understood how to write their chord sequences, and make a good bassline using chord notes and passing notes. But lots of them found that their practical skills did not run to playing the chords accurately and in time, let alone adding vocals at the same time.

Using a sequencing program to input the chords and bass allowed students to manipulate timbres and figurations in a way that was simply impossible in a practical setting, and then freed them up for devising a good structure and singing over the top of their own backing. Using technology, a professional-sounding result was possible that made students feel proud of their work.

5 Music Teacher May 2015

Where does notation fit into your plans? This is a whole resource in itself, but does need thought as part of your

planning process. What will you use notation for? How will you teach it? Will you adopt a ‘sound before symbol’

approach, and use notation to support, rather than drive, musical activity?

What is KS3 music for? This is a million-dollar question if ever there was one.

There are some who argue that KS3 music forms the first two or three years of a five-year GCSE course.

However, GCSE music itself has a great many detractors, who feel that it favours ‘traditional’ musicians. This

is in spite of all of the boards going to some lengths to ensure that DJs, rappers, beatboxers and techies are

catered for.

I know of a school where the whole of KS3 is devoted to developing keyboard skills, so that those who choose

GCSE have something to use for their performing coursework. Are you prepared to do anything like this? For

my part, I most definitely am not. If there is to be a fall-back option for GCSE performing I would want it to

be singing, and hope that what we do at KS3 makes most of my students confident enough about singing to

consider doing it for their GCSE. But then, I’m a singer, so perhaps I would say that.

One thing is for sure, though: KS3 music is the last chance we have to influence directly the musical thinking

of all our students. So, what do you want them to have gained from their two or three years with you? What are

the attitudes, skills and knowledge that they should acquire along the way? What do you want a 14-year-old

musician to look and sound like?

Backwards planning, involving establishing your age-related expectations, is going to be essential in

formulating your KS3 curriculum. However, teachers are mostly pragmatists, and you will no doubt be mindful

of your future GCSE value-added scores. So you may well want to mix in a little nod towards GCSE preparation,

in whatever way is palatable to you. For me, that involves building musical skills, without going near the actual

content that they will cover at GCSE – the last thing I want is to traipse through all the same topics at KS3 and

again at KS4.

6Music Teacher May 2015

gettIng down to MaKIng a concrete Plan

So, you are fully armed with detailed knowledge of your stance on a range of cultural and pedagogical

questions, together with the strengths and weaknesses of your department. The next step, as mentioned

above, is to identify the skills and knowledge that you want your students to have acquired by the age of 14.

In their excellent book Lesson Planning for Effective Learning (Open University Press, 2013), Martin Fautley

and Jonathan Savage suggest that you should start by making a mindmap of the concepts you wish to cover.

It is important to remember Richard Koch’s 80:20 principle here: 20% of the most vital concepts hold 80% of

the value to the learning process. So, what you put onto your mindmap is of crucial importance. Here is mine:

Added to these things, I wanted to ensure that my students had the following:

� open-mindedness to unfamiliar music

� Knowledge of how to behave as a performer/audience member (performing etiquette)

� Some understanding of the historical/cultural context of at least some different styles

� an idea of the connections between music and other art forms such as dance

The next step is to put them in order, and then fit topics around them. With musical ideas, this is easier said

than done: I don’t necessarily want to start just with rhythm and then work up to melodies and chords. There

is a certain element of making a big splash at the start: diving into some performing straight away, and then

picking apart the concepts later. So, given that, here is a rough order:

1. Melody, rhythm, chords and basslines – what they are, and how they are different. At the same time, get

into good habits regarding performing etiquette and the way the music room runs. Also work on developing

vocal and instrumental technique and confidence.

2. A closer look at rhythm, including metre, ostinato and then rhythm notation.

3. A closer look at melody and chords, including ostinato, major and minor, and pitch notation.

4. Start thinking about the way that notes fit together: creating melodies and basslines out of chord notes,

creating different textures, and how notes and chords relate to keys.

5. Developing musical ideas: structure, and different approaches to creating a balance between variety and

unity.

Sometimes teachers have told me that KS3 students ‘don’t need’ to cover harmony, or that it’s ‘too hard’. I think both of these assumptions are nonsense. If any kind of real musical understanding is to occur, then that involves understanding at least some of the ways in which notes fit together. I want my students to understand the concept of key, and the importance of tonic and dominant chords within them. I think understanding the difference between major and minor chords and keys is important, and want my students to experiment with changing keys, and from major to minor. I have never found these things to be conceptually beyond KS3 students, and my students have always enjoyed gaining this understanding – it makes them feel like musicians, which can only be a good thing.

7 Music Teacher May 2015

You will notice here that I don’t dwell on the ‘elements of music’: pitch, tempo, duration, dynamics and so on.

For years and years I started Year 7 with a look at each of these, but have become disillusioned with that. My

thinking has changed over time, and now my first concern is to identify elements on a slightly larger, more

contextual scale: melody, rhythm, chords and bassline. Most music has these elements, and being able to

identify and recreate these things just makes musical sense. If any of these things are absent from a piece or

whole style (for example the absence of chords in Indian classical music), then that is a feature in itself.

For me, this is all part of the 80:20 rule: I came to the conclusion that it was melody, rhythm, chords and

basslines that were deserving of a place in my 20%, not a ‘building bricks’ approach encompassing individual

elements.

Fitting the topics to the list of concepts

This is the fun part – bringing it all together and coming up with a topic overview for your KS3 curriculum.

Tweaking this – or changing it completely – year by year is one of the truly enjoyable facets of having the

freedom to organise your own curriculum.

I do believe, however, that you need to hang onto those concepts, and not get sidetracked into creating a

shopping list of things to do. By identifying the concepts first, you are giving yourself some broad learning

objectives. It will be necessary to spend some time gaining instrumental and technical skills, but this should

not be the end point of what you are doing: it is not enough simply to be ‘doing’ guitars, keyboards, or (even

worse) Sibelius. You need to be doing them for a reason. For example, you might be building guitar skills as

part of a project on songwriting, or exploring chords.

My topic map for KS3 currently looks like this:

Term 1 Term 2 Term 3

Year

7

workshop performing and composingPreparing for year 7 concertrhythm notation

underground Music (rhythm composition based on John Paynter’s classic project from the 1980s)Pitch notation, ostinato, chords and song structure: performing ‘Somebody that I used to Know’

Finish gotye performancesopera: singing, analysing opera death scenes and then composing one

homework project: Instruments and their families

homework project: Instrumental ensembles

homework project: Music and the stage

Year

8

theme and variations on Frère Jacques (based on the third movement of Mahler’s First Symphony): focus on tonality and various aspects of development

12-bar blues: performing a range of songs including ‘I Feel good’ and ‘hound dog’, practising improvising and then composing blues songs

Film music: exploring the connections between musical and dramatic ideas. Focus on harmony and a range of compositional devices such as inverted pedals, ostinato and dissonance

homework project: music in advertising

homework project: american music of the 20th century

homework project: music and film

Year

9

Minimalism: using repetition, phase shifting, metamorphosis, fading and additive/subtractive patterns to compose a piece for a ‘flight’ on the london eye

Songwriting: workshopped performances followed by writing songs using a chord sequence as a starting point

one of the following: y reggae y Bhangra y club dance y disco

homework project: music and art

homework project: songs and songwriters

homework project (depending on practical project): y Music of the caribbean y Music of India y Music and dance

8Music Teacher May 2015

The Year 9 projects, in particular, may go in a different order with different classes. This is completely dependent

on the timetable, and access to the room that has the computers, so that each class can get some access at

appropriate times.

A lot of this is up for discussion, and may well change before September. However, it serves as an example of

the process from concept map to topic map.

The Scheme of Learning (or Scheme of Work) document

In many ways, this is one of the least important parts of the process: the important decisions have already been

made, and the document itself is just a formality. It may be that you are required to fill in a proforma that is used

by all subjects in your school, and so have very little choice as to its layout and content.

However, if you do have any choice in the matter, it is essential to think about who and what the document is

actually for. If it is for senior leaders, then why do they need it? It can be assumed that they are checking up

on certain aspects of KS3 provision in the school. What, exactly, are the things that they are looking for? This

depends on their current focus. It could be that they want to see how you are going to ensure that all kinds of

students can make progress. There may be a focus on having evidence of progress over time. There could

be a focus on assessment. It is worthwhile finding out what SLT’s priorities are, even if you have to go and ask

directly. There is nothing more disheartening than giving your all to a superbly detailed document, and then

finding that you’ve been barking up the wrong tree all along, and could have spent your time doing something

more useful.

If part of the purpose of the document is to inform colleagues about what they should be teaching, think

carefully about the amount of detail/prescription that is required. This will depend on how much support and

direction they need. If you are a close-knit department that communicates well on a day-to-day level, it is

unlikely to need a lot of detail, especially if you have a good sense of a shared philosophy.

I would be reluctant to provide a lesson-by-lesson set of plans for a unit of work under any circumstances. This

is educational madness, and is a prime example of destructive control-freakery. Even if teachers or SLT require

detailed plans, there is no way that anything other than a relatively loose time-frame can be applied. Different

classes take different amounts of time to do different things, and teaching needs to be responsive, acting on

formative assessment that takes place, and planning the subsequent lesson accordingly. You need to be able

to return to things, or whizz on quickly, depending on the needs of the students. Added to the differences

between classes, there is also a whole range of unpredictable factors that can scupper your intentions – a fire

drill, vaccinations, a leaking roof, half the class out on a trip – all of which can take out a chunk of a lesson and

necessitate re-drawing your plans.

By all means, plan tasks in detail and set out the order in which they might be tackled. But it is simply a waste of

time to say with any kind of mock certainty how long each one will take. As with everything to do with planning

a curriculum, a large dose of pragmatism is a necessary ingredient.

The role of assessmenT

We have been assured repeatedly by Ofsted that levels and sub-levels should no longer be used, and indeed there has been much discussion about schools that still insist that level-based assessment takes place. Whatever regime you work with, and whatever degree of autonomy you have been granted, it is essential that you find a way of integrating assessment into your work, so that it forms an integral part of the activities rather than something that is ‘done to’ the work (and the students) at the end. In fact, mastery learning has formative assessment at its core, and with the likelihood of your classes being very mixed-ability, it is vital that there is constant assessment. This is the only way that you will be able to differentiate effectively, never mind the necessity for having evidence of progress over time.

For more information on one way of assessing without levels, see my Music Teacher resource from July 2014.