Curriculum Sequencing EYFS - Y8

There have been lots of books and blogs written about curriculum sequencing over the last few years but many of them are Secondary-centric. Up until now, that wouldn’t have bothered me as I was a secondary teacher but now, as a Head of Department in a Prep school, I find myself responsible for the curriculum sequencing across 10 year groups, from Nursery to Year 8. 

The first big shock for me was that I was now dealing with EYFS plus 3 further keystages, with a very vague National Curriculum to build on. Irritatingly vague statements such as “play tuned and untuned instruments musically”. Such statements give no indication as to the complexity of the music to be performed, simply the standard of the final product. It is obviously significantly easier to play 4 crotchets / semibreve rest (repeat ad infinitum) than it is to perform Steve Reich’s Clapping Music.

I was lucky to inherit a department which has a staggering amount of resources available, built up over about 25 years of Primary School music teaching, however I also met my nemesis with these resources - an uncatalogued library of hundreds of song books. Being what my IT manager husband (incidentally, in the same school) calls a “digital native” I have an unrational dislike of bundles of printed stuff. I must confess, nearly a year later, I still haven’t catalogued everything but I am getting there by logging every resource as I use it. Maybe I will be finished in a few years. 

Using a combination of Charanga, Sarah Watt’s songbooks and Red Hot Recorder, I have built a curriculum from EYFS-LKS2. I also adapted my existing KS3 curriculum to cater for UKS2 and KS3. The main thing I was missing, however, was something to ensure consistency off assessment across the 10 year groups and a way of tracking knowledge & skills progression across EYFS-Y8.

Building on the work of Prof Martin Fautley and Dr Alison Daubney for the ISM, I adapted their draft Music Curriculum statements for my setting, which I have shared here with the permission of my school. I also discuss these statements further in my blog "Using Assessment Rubrics in the Classroom".

The one thing I found to be most useful, however, in planning my curriculum as to take an audit of what I had already planned to teach, when I had planned to teach it, and when I planned to use it again. I used the template below and worked my way through every lesson, in every unit, for every year group until I had a clear picture of what our boys were being taught. I also took the opportunity to list all of the pieces of music we listen to in each unit and then collate them into a spreadsheet, something which would be similarly useful for an English department to track all the short stories and poetry covered in comprehension tasks that are not necessarily the main focus text of the unit. 

	Theory	Practical
First teaching	We are listening to:          Musical vocabulary covered	Name of piece of music       Musical skills taught
Second teaching
Further teaching
Strands covered

There is a focus on the repetition of knowledge taught as it is imperative that students learn and internalise this subject-specific knowledge over an extended period of time so that we may build on this incrementally with more challenging knowledge. Mary Myatt (2018) states that "Knowing things helps us to know more things. Knowing things helps us to connect with previous knowledge and to make connections. Knowing things make us feel clever....Linked to this is the knowledge and use of subject-specifc terminology. Each subject has its own vocabulary, which is used specifically within that subject ...and this meaning needs to be taught explicitly, practiced and used on a regular basis". 

Now that I have mapped the music curriculum, it's on to my next project - mapping all the subjects against each other to see where the natural cross-curricular links appear so we can rethink "topic" work to ensure it is underpinned by rigorous subject teaching which enhance the educational experiences on offer to our students so that they do not, in the words of Mary Myatt, "devolve into ridiculous, tenuous links". I'm off to the rewrite the Y3 Egyptian Music topic ....

Fautley, M. & Daubney, A. ISM -The National Curriculum for Music A revised framework for curriculum, pedagogy and assessment in key stage 3 music. Incorporate Society of Musicians

Myatt, M. (2018). The curriculum: Gallimaufry to coherence. John Catt Educational Limited.

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