Medway's Vision for Music

• We use music as a key driver for our initiative to enrich the cultural capital of our children by exposing them to compositions that they are not likely to encounter within their home learning environment.
• We believe that music is for everyone. We have built seamless integration between Music and ICT to harness our children's skills as digital natives to make music accessible to every child. The prevalence of technology is linked to our efforts to broaden our children's cultural capital. We know that a large majority of our children come from disadvantaged backgrounds where access to musical instruments or tuition might not be widely available to them. Hence, we use freely available online platforms and applications so that children can continue exploring and enjoying music within their home learning environment. (Purple Mash; Google Chrome Music Lab; GarageBand)
• We don't use an external scheme of work. Instead, we place our trust in our teachers and give them autonomy and independence to create lessons from start to finish. This gives teachers more ownership of the content they are teaching and avoids constraining their and their children's creativity.
• Following on from the earlier point, not using an external scheme of work allows us to ensure that there are meaningful connections between the various subjects being studied. This, in turn, provides an immersive learning experience to students whereby they develop a broader understanding of the central topics being studied. (Mayan Music in Y2; Egyptian Music in Y3; Creating national identities through Music and DT Y6)
• The deep and meaningful cross-curricular links also gives the students a sense of purpose for the music they compose. Composition is linked to other aspects of the curriculum to ensure that there is a purposeful rationale for the tasks performed by children. (Composing suspense music in Y4)