Teach Primary Issue 18.2

DR L I Z STAFFORD unscheduled ‘pop-in’) music lesson in school. No-one enjoys an Ofsted inspection, so all power to the 50 schools (25 of them primary) who volunteered to have inspectors visit them for the purposes of generating content for the Ofsted Music Subject Report, which was published in September 2023. And thank goodness they did volunteer, because the result is a useful, practical, and realistic document for music advocacy and improvement. The overall findings The major news to note is that this report paints a comparatively rosy picture of music in primary schools – at last! There is so much negativity about primary music on social media, and it often feels like primary schools are being unfairly blamed for all of secondaries’ woes. The aspect of the music curriculum that Ofsted praised most in the primary schools it visited was singing provision, which it acknowledged that primaries I t’s the last week of the Easter term and my penultimate day of teaching, possibly forever. Due to a house move involving dramatic distances, I’ve given notice on my part-time role as a music teacher in a local primary school and I’m looking forward to a fun-packed practical session with my class as my last hurrah. Then we get the call. The head and a significant number of our teaching staff are up a mountain a hundred miles away on our Year 6 residential. To us, it seems obvious that we will be able to defer, but as the hours tick away it becomes clear that this is not an option. Then the inspection team starts talking subjects, and music is mentioned… are they absolutely joking? On my last day?! Fortunately, I was saved by the fact that as a contractor, not an employee, I only taught the music – our official music subject lead was up that mountain with the head. Negotiations were had, art took the bullet instead, and my pupils and I got to enjoy my last, fun-filled (although slightly tense in case of an generally do better than secondaries. However, it also noted that the teaching of composing was a weak area across both primary and secondary provision. Ofsted articulates in this report that the schools with the strongest music provision organise their timetable on a weekly basis, ensuring that these weekly lessons are long enough to adequately cover the curriculum. Another aspect inspectors praised in the most effective schools was the use of practice time and feedback, which gives children the chance to improve their work, rather than just moving on to the next activity regardless. The inspectors noted that the most successful schools were the ones whose curriculums were not full of short, chop- ping-and-changing topics, but instead focused on incremental learning of core skills through repetition of practical activities and content. On the flip side, the inspectors found that many schools used content 58 | www.teachwire.net “Schools with the strongest provision organise their timetable on a weekly basis” Singing from the same HYMN SHEET Find out how your school can best adopt Ofsted’s latest music recommendations