School21: creating a community

As we face an ongoing recruitment and retention crisis in education, I am humbled by the unwavering passion, dedication and commitment of our music team at School21. Every member of the team has been integral to the design, delivery and constant re-drafting of our 4–18 music curriculum over the last decade. In a school that has only been open since 2012, this commitment of time represents the majority of its history. The work is challenging, relentless and consuming. Fulfilling the ambitions we have for music education demands us to be teachers, musicians, curriculum makers, fundraisers, accountants, community builders, timetablers, event coordinators, negotiators and – where that fails – rule breakers (seek forgiveness, never permission).

And yet, instead of burn-out, I feel energised by the collective motivation, accountability and joy every day I come to school. How do we sustain this culture and scale of work and continue to drive it forwards? Colleagues’ responses included:

• We focus our curriculum on authentic and purposeful music-making – teaching music the way it should be experienced
• We see and treat music as central to building a strong culture of community and celebration across the whole school
• We have, and constantly demand, a supportive infrastructure for music within the school.

This relies on having a clear, transparently shared vision and set of design principles that promote accountability across teachers, students and the school; open and reflective practices that require us to keep asking questions of our work; and a continuous, developmental process of curriculum design that puts our core practices and values at the centre of everything we do.

Curriculum design

School21’s 4–18 music curriculum serves a diverse community in an area of high socio-economic deprivation in Newham, East London. It is built out of five core practices: ensemble, mastery, community, creativity and flow. These inform and connect everything we discuss, deliver and develop as part of the music education journey of our students.

This is a deliberate reversal of a content-first approach, avoiding the trap of backwards planning from KS4/5 qualifications, which can lead to a stifling of ambition and possibility within the curriculum that precedes it. This doesn't mean that this point in the journey isn’t important (our GCSE music results have been in the top 10% nationally within the last five years, and students have gone on to study music at Cambridge University), but we want more than this for our students and community.

Our curriculum is also divided into phases that tie into the overall school vision. Children move through a foundational stage building a love of musical learning (ages 4–9), to an exploratory stage developing passions and independence (ages 9–14), and, finally, to a personal growth stage promoting autonomy and empowerment (ages 14–18). Each phase brings increasing depth of understanding and experience in our core practices via programmes, projects and models of curriculum design that are created and adapted to our context and cohorts. One such example is our Years 5–9 Band Project programme, which begins with a two-year immersive ensemble curriculum learning an instrument as part of a big band, wind band or string orchestra. Through this authentic set-up, class teachers and instrumental teachers collaborate to design and deliver a range of projects with tailored set-works, featuring outcomes and audiences that bring purpose to learning this instrument over a sustained period of time.

In Years 7–9, students can opt into the three-year Scholarship phase of the programme, taught vertically, where they engage in further projects using their Band Project instrument within the school's 2hr weekly project curriculum slot, including intergenerational community music-making projects. Opting into this (which around a third of each cohort do) also means receiving continued access to instrumental lessons, now on a subsidised scale depending on need. We dedicate much of our time to fundraising several thousands of pounds every year in order to keep this going – 24hr Musicathons, Friends of S21 Music memberships and funding applications are all part of the day job.

Our core Years 7–9 curriculum, for all students, comprises nine twelve-week immersive projects book-ended by an Enquiry Question and Authentic Outcome. This drives accountability and motivation for both teacher and student, and demands rigorous and responsive planning in order to achieve a rich learning process and beautiful work as part of the final product. That work might be a collective outcome by the class/year group, such as a performance, podcast or musical event, or individual/small-group outcomes that contribute to a wider whole, such as a collection of songs for an album, a silent disco, a competition or community group event. The consistent feature of these is that every piece of work/outcome is exhibited in some form and takes the learning beyond the classroom and a checklist of content coverage. This way of designing curriculum stems from a Project Based Learning model, utilising the adapted planning framework.

Festival of Light

During the 10 years of compulsory music education for students aged 4–14 at School21, every child will have been a part of 10 sell-out Festival of Light concerts (sharing the work of their Autumn-term curriculum projects), a Year 4 musical, a two-year immersive Band Project programme, a Year 6 Tea Party recital, two Gala concerts, an annual project exhibition, and a Year 9 Battle of the Bands event. There is no opt-out of any of this, for these are the authentic manifestations and outcomes of the music curriculum, delivered for two hours weekly throughout this time. Beyond this, every child has access to the Years 7–9 Band Project Scholarship programme with its large-scale performance and intergenerational projects, extra-curricular ensembles, KS4/5 music qualifications, mastery competitions, a professional-quality musical, the community choir, international music tours and subsidised instrumental lessons where they are needed (which is the majority of cases).

External support

All of this requires a commitment to constant fundraising, collaborative thinking, flexible curriculum design, relationship building and forensic planning by everyone in the team. It also demands a commitment by the school to enable this, by ensuring that music education is a weekly experience for all students until at least the end of KS3; by staffing it accordingly; by supporting events both logistically and physically; and by taking the time to understand what it takes to run a music department on such a scale.

Too many music teachers are getting by without this infrastructure. We must continue to do what we can to break this cycle, and demand more of our school leaders, our MATs and our government in terms of engagement and commitment to music and arts education.

In schools where the arts thrive, the community also thrives. Music is more than a subject; it’s a lifeline, it's belonging, it's fulfilment. We see this every day at School21, and it has been so uplifting for us to have been nominated and ultimately win the Outstanding School Music Department award as a result of the testimonies of families as well as pupils.

Such testimonies are, I'm sure, repeated up and down the country by the countless students and families that music teachers reach through what they do. If the work we do is not for them, then who is it for? So here's to us, here's to serving our communities and here's to you for all you do.

Community testimonies

• ‘The music department has played a pivotal role in fostering a sense of unity and belonging within the school. The department’s commitment to inclusivity has allowed students from diverse backgrounds to express themselves through music, irrespective of their socio-economic status.’
• ‘Every child has the opportunity to find their voice and their self-expression through music – all kinds of music.’
• ‘They know every single child. They, in our case, have been with our son on his journey since reception. He has just entered Year 9. These bonds and relationships are priceless. When our son struggles at school, the music team are the ones who ground him.’