INTENT

Music is central to every pupil’s experience at St Richard’s, and has the potential to enrich their lives enormously. There are three main strands to their experiences:

• In the classroom
• The extra-curricular programme
• Supporting the Faith ethos of the college

Our focus in the music department is to ensure that each and every pupil leaves St Richard’s Catholic College with a lifelong love of music. Pupils will be independent, confident, risk-taking learners who are motivated and enthused by all aspects of the curriculum. We aim to instil this passion through a diverse, creative, engaging curriculum and through the outstanding vocal and instrumental opportunities that enrichment and the peripatetic programmes provides. In addition, pupils will develop their instrumental and vocal abilities through weekly assemblies, services and masses. We will also encourage all pupils to develop their confidence, self esteem and performance skills by participating in music concerts, school shows/musicals, workshops, choral singing at Westminster Cathedral/ Arundel Cathedral and regular appearances at the De La Warr plus many more. 

In the classroom, critical thinking is crucial to the musical development of every pupil. We encourage pupils to distinguish between musical styles and genres and to have a solid and deep understanding of the history, context and musical dimensions. 

Performance (Hands) 

Composition (Heart) 

Listening/Appraising (Head) 

These three headings are at the very core of our curriculum.

Music is divided in three components:

1: Performing  2: Composing 3: Listening/Appraising

These three components are evident in all areas of our KS3/KS4 curriculum.

In KS3/4 we like to keep our lessons as practical as possible and ensure that all pupils have an opportunity to perform in front of the class or a smaller audience to receive constructive feedback. The practical nature of the lessons encourages them to be independent learners and they often use detailed, differentiated resources to enable development in the classroom. 

We also ensure that all pupils have the opportunity to compose within each topic. Pupils apply their knowledge and understanding of compositional techniques from term 2 in Yr 7. These are then developed in every topic throughout Ks3. Listening and Appraising is assessed with regular recall and retrieval practice of the MAD T SHIRTS. 

Pupils have access to a wide range of classroom instruments including P-bones, P-cornets and P-trumpets, ukuleles, guitars, electric guitars and basses, keyboards, djembe, samba drums and varied percussion as well as extensive music technology – Garageband/Logic/Bandlab/YUStudio/Musescore and Sibelius. We encourage pupils specialising in particular instruments to include these in their classroom work too.

Pupils are able to use metacognitive strategies in class and will regularly make links between their learning and are exposed to a variety of recall activities, through oracy tasks, quizzes, google forms and games that assess their knowledge and understanding. We regularly use modelling and live marking in music technology, performance and composition work. Pupils are able to identify the areas that they wish to develop in their musical learning, and are able to speak eloquently about their progress, whilst referring to musical keywords and techniques.