Intent

At John Henry Newman Academy, our music curriculum, guided by the Kapow Primary Music scheme, embodies our vision to “Let Your Light Shine” through our values of love, courage, community, and celebration with the intention of our Music curriculum being to nurture each child’s sense of musicality and foster a life-long passion for music.

We focus on developing essential skills, knowledge, and understanding that empower children to become confident performers, composers, and listeners. Our curriculum exposes pupils to diverse music from around the world and across generations, encouraging respect and appreciation for all musical traditions and communities.

Through singing, playing instruments, improvising, composing, and listening, children will gain a deep understanding of music’s history and cultural context, and how music can be notated. Our music programme also aims to cultivate transferable skills such as teamwork, leadership, creative thinking, problem-solving, decision-making, and presentation. These skills are crucial for their development as learners and have broad applications in their lives beyond school.

Implementation

At John Henry Newman Academy, music is taught as a discrete subject, but it is also integrated into other areas of the curriculum when appropriate, enhancing the overall educational experience.

Our implementation of the music curriculum adopts a holistic approach, interweaving various strands to provide engaging and enriching learning experiences. These strands include:

• Listening and Evaluating
• Creating Sound
• Notation
• Improvising and Composing
• Performing

Each music lesson aims to combine these elements within a cross-curricular topic designed to captivate pupils’ imaginations and foster a genuine enthusiasm for music. Over the course of their musical education, students will learn to sing fluently and expressively, and to play both tuned and untuned instruments with accuracy and control. They will gain an understanding of the interrelated dimensions of music—such as pitch, duration, tempo, timbre, structure, texture, and dynamics—and use these elements expressively in their own improvisations and compositions.