Preparing all students for Key Stage 4

"Preparing all students for Key Stage 4" was the title of a Teach Through Music 'Inspire event' that I attended on Wednesday this week. The event, which was really a seminar and forum for discussion, looked at the various different options for students post-KS3 (GCSEs, BTECs, NCFEs, etc...), and considered both how these work - or should work - for different students, and how Key Stage 3 teaching should prepare students to continue to study Music. Of course, all while considering the historically - and continually - low uptake of GCSE Music (hovering around 8% nationally).


Of course, there were no real answers. Other than, I suppose, to recognise that different students come from different backgrounds, have different experiences and interests, and want different things out of their Music education. In fact, this very fact could well be what makes our job, as Music teachers, so difficult. In one year 9 class of 30 at my current school, I have a grade 6 classical violinist with no interest in taking part in 'school music', an accomplished guitarist singer-songwriter with ambitions for a career in the pop music industry, a host of grade 2-4 pianists, violinists and flautists looking to take Music at GCSE, three students who love nothing better than to stay behind after the lesson and discuss rock music from the 1960s to the present day, four Carnatic (Southern Indian) musicians who spend a huge amount of their time outside of school immersed in their own musical tradition - and of course a whole range of students whose musical experience is more limited to their lessons in school and their own music listening, some of whom will want to continue to study Music next year, and others won't. How, in one hour-long lesson per week, I can ensure that each of these students is challenged, encouraged and supported in their Music learning at a level appropriate to their ability and their interests, is a question that requires a lot of thought, and possibly has no satisfactory answer. But it was not this particular question that got me thinking this week.


The issue that really intrigued me this week (of the many that were raised at Wednesday's seminar) was how we can teach Music in a continuous, joined-up, way, from Key Stage to Key Stage. Certainly one conclusion from the discussions on Wednesday - which included a panel interview with four very articulate and interesting year 11 students from two London schools - was that there should be a real sense of continuity throughout secondary Music (and indeed from primary to secondary - though this is a slightly different issue) in order to encourage more students in Year 9 to choose to study Music in years 10-11. One of the most commonly cited reasons for students choosing not to continue their musical education is the sense of elitism that surrounds Key Stage 4 (and particularly GCSE) Music - the idea that students need to be highly accomplished on an instrument, or singing, in a way that cannot be attained in classroom lessons alone, in order to succeed. This idea is not without foundation, with GCSE performance units requiring students to perform to a minimum of approximately grade 3 standard in order to be able to obtain the highest grades. Indeed, we teachers (myself included) tend to rely on students' extra-curricular music lessons - even if these only start in year 10 - to support them through the performance side of the course.


However, several speakers at Wednesday's seminar suggested that this should not be the case. Keith Evans - programme leader of Teach Through Music and fellow and director of the Music PGCE at the University of Greenwich - argued that Music should be taught more like Art, where students are given the skills and encouragement to think of themselves as artists from the very beginning, such that every student is considered capable of continuing to study the subject to GCSE level.


So, how do we ensure that every student is prepared, and able, to study Music GCSE at the end of year 9? The main concern of teachers - or at least those with whom I spoke on Wednesday - seems to be that of teaching notation, and instrumental/vocal performance. How do we ensure that students learn enough about notation, and music theory, at Key Stage 3, within the atmosphere of creativity and inclusivity that encourages engagement - and that is praised by Ofsted, who rightly discourage the teaching of theory separately from engagement with music itself? How can we give all students, of such differing abilities, instrumental performance skills, within just one lesson per week?


One possible solution seems to lie in Whole Class Ensemble Teaching (formerly 'Wider Opportunities'), whereby students are taught instruments en masse. This is an increasingly popular approach at primary schools (which many secondary schools seem to be yet to recognise), and one which some secondary schools are starting to take up. In my North London school, we're currently delivering a WCET brass project to year 8 - every student is learning the trumpet or trombone. 9 weeks in, and the first cohort have (mostly!) mastered the notes C to A, and are reading music in 4 and 3 time, including (as of this week) dotted rhythms. Obviously within the cohort, progress is wide-ranging - as is the amount of individual practice that the students are putting in - but there is no doubt that each student is gaining a good understanding of how music works, and how it feels to be a 'real' musician. However, this project will finish in February - indeed, we're already half way through - and a new cohort will begin, while the current cohort swap back to a more 'normal' year 8 programme of work, including song-writing, samba drumming and an introduction to Music  Technology. It was my choice to run the programme like this, of course, and I believe that the skills that the students will learn in the second half of the year are just as valuable as those that they are learning now. But it's difficult to choose to cut short such a beneficial programme.


Some schools, of course, are able to manage this in other ways. The much-acclaimed Isaac Newton Academy in Ilford gives students two Music lessons per week - one 'Big Band' lesson (WCET) and one curriculum-based Music lesson. Others - such as St Gabriel's College in Lambeth - are able to offer large numbers of students heavily subsidised, or free, small group instrumental lessons as part of the Music department's standard offer. It is of note, of course, that both of these schools 'specialise' in Music, and have a large amount of ring-fenced funding to enable these programmes to exist - not something that is available to every school.


Another suggestion from Wednesday's seminar was that we should start to teach our Key Stage 3 Musicians more like we teach our GCSE classes. The reverse has been long-suggested as a way to ensure that Key Stage 4 lessons are engaging and practical - but what does it really mean to consider this the other way around? As I currently deliver Edexcel GCSE Music, a major part of what I teach at Key Stage 4 is the study of 'set works' - pieces of music that we get to know in depth, not only through listening and discussion, but through performing them and composing in response to them. Admittedly, I have my reservations about how this translates into the listening exam (which seems to be much more of a recollection exam than testing any real aural skills), but nonetheless, students gain a rigorous understanding of music through their study of these. So what if I tried this at Key Stage 3? I spent an hour yesterday arranging the instrumental parts of Handel's 'And The Glory of the Lord' to be performed by my year 10 class - but what about my year 9s? Could I not create a version which gave a challenging solo to my grade 6 violinist, accompanied by a guitar chord pattern for my singer-songwriter, a Carnatic-notated counter-melody and a range of grade 2-3 parts, as well as more simple vocal and keyboard or xylophone parts for those students without an instrumental specialism? Of course I could! And perhaps it is this sort of activity - reading from differentiated notation, performing together as a whole-class ensemble - which might allow all students to start to feel like musicians who could continue to study the subject at GCSE - and who could continue to develop their performance skills - even if they are 'just' on the xylophone - to a higher level suitable for GCSE performance.


Of course, there's no way I would have time to prepare something like this for every lesson, or every scheme of work at Key Stage 3. But even if there were one whole-class ensemble project - based on some sort of 'set work' - per year, I do think this could make a real difference to how students perceive their ability as musicians. And, of course, to how confident students feel about reading notation. As with all things, if we expect a certain level, students will tend to rise to it, learning by osmosis and with support from their peers - something that is made much more feasible in a whole-class ensemble.


But wait - do I do this already? A conversation with a non-music teacher at my school this week about the end of year Music exams that he has invigilated suggested that perhaps, to some extent, I do. In talking about the end of year Music exams which our Key Stage 3 students take (which are written in the style of a GSCE listening exam, with questions based on styles of music studied over the course of that year), he mentioned that he is often impressed by the students' abilities to answer complex questions about Music, including notation and theoretical understanding, by the end of year 9. Do I spend a lot of time teaching them theory, he asked? I responded no - not at all - but that the gaining of theoretical musical knowledge was an implicit expectation in each topic that we study. And thus I realised that, perhaps, I am already doing much of what is required to prepare every student for Key Stage 4.


An example. Year 9 are currently studying Music of Africa and the Caribbean. Although I want them to be exposed to music from other cultures in this topic, what I'm really hoping is that they will all develop their understanding of rhythmic notation (in various forms) and improve their ensemble performance skills. In the first two lessons, we've performed Harry Belafonte's 'Jamaican Farewell' together as a class - adding clapped rhythms which we read from box-dot notation. The students have then worked in groups to create their own arrangements of this song, using ukuleles, guitars, keyboards and a range of percussion to add chords, bass lines, addition rhythms and in some cases, vocal harmonies, with every student taking part in the performance as a singer or instrumentalist. All of which was supported by simple 'task sheets' containing all they needed to know about the key, chords and metre of the piece. Perhaps this isn't so different from a GCSE lesson after all. And all of this, in just two lessons? These students are clearly already musicians - maybe I just need to remind them of this more often.


So I suppose my conclusions from all of this is are twofold:


1. That I do want to do more whole-class ensemble work with my Key Stage 3 students - whether this is through continuing a WCET project or, more likely (and less costly), through embedding it in some of my schemes of work, and spending some time arranging pieces to enable this to happen.


But also, 2. That a lot of what I - and doubtless many other Music teachers - already do at Key Stage 3 does prepare students adequately for Key Stage 4. What is needed, perhaps, is a break away from any sort of discussion of Music as an elite subject, and a move towards a style of teaching which makes it explicitly clear to students in years 7-9 that they are learning to be a 'real' musician already. And that each and every one of them has the ability to continue to study the subject further, and to perform at a higher level. As long as they put in the practice, of course - but that's an issue for another day, and another blog post...