Making KS3 Music accessible

In my article ‘Sequential learning’ (Music Teacher, April 2022), I wrote about the pathways for GCSE Music performance via music technology. This explained how ‘sequenced realised performance’ (SRP) and ‘production via technology’ routes exist alongside purely live performance at GCSE. For the present article, I want to tackle how we might approach the teaching of listening, analysing, improvising and composing in our everyday KS3 classroom practice, so that studying Music at GCSE is as viable an option as every other subject.

If you don't start the explicit teaching of musical language until Year 10, there will be a gaping chasm between those who have had specialist tuition and those who have not. Teaching students how to hear and talk like musicians needs to begin in the first week of Year 7. Use specialist language alongside lay language right from the start and at every moment of your hands-on music-making with students in the classroom. Sometimes we, as professional musicians, forget that we're asking students to hear like we do, and to articulate what they hear using specialist vocabulary. We do it without a second thought, but it's a brand new way of listening and thinking to most. As I often say, walk in their shoes.