A strategy for music education. Bespoke programming and timetabling. Full HR support including recruitment, performance management, payrolling and ongoing learning. Plus best practices and shared knowledge from our wide network of partner schools. All the benefits of a regional music service or trust, tailored for your individual school.
While it might be easy to imagine there’s a “typical” Sing Education music engagement – in our case, that wouldn’t truly be accurate. All our music provision is developed uniquely and in direct partnership with each individual school. From teacher assignment, timetabling and lesson formats to afternoon clubs, singing assemblies and extracurricular performances – every aspect of the provision is built around your schools’ specific needs and requirements.
There are, however, some common elements across our programming.
For example, your curricular plan might involve lessons with all or some year groups, timetabled on a weekly basis alongside singing assemblies that gather each key stage, whole-school or year group together. Frequently these decisions depend on the size of your school plus lunchtime and after-school provision that you have, or wish to put, in place. For instance, a large school with three- or four-form entry might have a rotation, where half of the year group have music one week and the other half have music the following week, to allow for PPA cover time as well. Whereas some schools, especially a smaller school, might choose to have music with all year groups every week on their scheduled day or days.
Lessons are typically 45 minutes. But, they do vary from 30 minutes to an hour, depending on the school and what suits their timetable and their PPA schedule, among other things. Music lessons take place either in an allocated music room – which is ideal – or in the classroom or hall. We aim to keep this consistent in each school. And when lessons take place in class, we simply ask teachers to coordinate the moving of desks so that the children have plenty of space for the high-energy, active music-making that we do.
With our instrumental and vocal tuition, lessons are timetabled during the school day, in either 20-minute, or more frequently 30-minute intervals. In some schools, this is on rotation and our Sing Education teacher will then be in charge of making sure children have their scheduled lessons. At primary age pupils may not naturally remember lesson times from week to week, so our teacher is responsible for collecting students from class, conducting their lessons and returning them back to class on time. Sing Education takes the worry and stress out of what can be an overwhelming number of moving parts by handling all the timetabling for our instrumental, as well as curricular, music offering.
We offer help with planning the best timetables for music.
Before the commencement of provision – in fact with each proposal we prepare for a school – we include a suggested music schedule based on the schools’ daily timings, breaks, lunchtimes, etc. Our recommendations ensure that your music programme fits together seamlessly with your wider school timetable. Using our years of classroom experience, we are able to deliver all the key elements of a thriving music provision – such as classroom music, assemblies, clubs, choirs, and instrumental provision – comfortably within the school day.
Knowledge pooling and best practice sharing across schools is the cornerstone of our consultative approach. Sing Education was designed from the start to deliver a comprehensive service, so we have the structures and processes in place to draw together all the experiences of our teachers, across all of our partner schools. We share these insights for the collective benefit of our network.
Creative ideas, new methodologies and transferable practice are fed back regularly through our teachers to the leadership team. These data points then inform our strategic planning, operational processes and training guidelines. All schools receive updates on relevant policy and practice enhancements and as such benefit from the wider experiences of our full teaching network. We also routinely look at what schools outside our area are doing and assess the best practices of our industry.
Last but not least, Sing Education’s approach to full-service music provision means that we offer a diverse menu of teacher management benefits to partner schools. These include key areas such as sourcing and recruitment, onboarding, training and development, performance management, HR compliance, payrolling, ongoing CPD and safeguarding checks. As and when required, we also offer full support to schools needing to transition in new music teaching staff due to short- or long-term absence cover.
