After school clubs causing you stress? Instrumental storage room in chaos? Music teacher on six-month sabbatical? Don’t worry. Sing Education can help. Through our consultancy services and curricular provision, we can provide peace of mind around key issues such as timetabling, pupil safeguarding, music equipment supply, teacher transition and more.
First and foremost, we help schools plan their curricular music, plus any instrumental or singing provision (one-to-one or small group). Once the curriculum is nearly finalised, we’ll look at space planning and organization. So, whether that’s in the music room or in the hall, we’ll offer our professional opinion as to the best way to plan the space.
We also do a lot of timetabling consultancy, meaning we help schools develop their non-core subjects’ timetables. This often is to help deliver PPA time to teachers most efficiently. We work with both internal staff and external providers of other enrichment subjects, such as PE and Modern Foreign Languages, to devise a timetable that gives class teachers their full allocation of PPA time. At the same time, we are able to ensure that the children are getting the highest quality music and enrichment subject learning.
We also provide consultancy around equipment. So, whether that includes specialist kit for the music classroom, instruments for private lessons or public address systems and other AV gear for shows and performances, we assist with recommendations on sourcing, rental and purchase. Through periodic audits, we also work with schools to help them keep an accurate, up-to-date inventory of the equipment they have on hand so that they can budget for repairs and replacements with accuracy.
The final area of consultancy that we provide for schools is staff CPD and wellbeing workshops. We provide music CPD within the schools that we partner with for classroom music and also to other schools on an ad hoc basis where there is a need or want to develop their staff’s music teaching. So, we develop and deliver bespoke train-the-trainer workshops for those schools. Included in our offer are wellbeing workshops where we come in and teach the staff some music themselves. We have found this to be an extremely successful way of developing staff morale and wellbeing within a school.
We are a safe employer. We seek references for all new recruits, as well as undertaking enhanced DBS checks with barred lists checks as well. We have a solid safeguarding framework that covers all areas of safeguarding of children. This provides the backbone of our training around safeguarding and our policy around safeguarding.
Safeguarding is of paramount importance for us at Sing Education. All of our teachers receive training around how to ensure that children remain safe, and also feel safe at all times. So, a lot of this is down to being aware of one’s own personal conduct and how you interact with children, to ensure that they feel safe at all times, not just when a safeguarding matter occurs.
We are proactive. For instance, we work together with the school to ensure the room in which music takes place is suitable, appropriate and in line with their safeguarding policies. This extends to all teaching settings, whether we’re looking at curricular class music, one-to-one lessons or small group tuition. As an example, one-to-one lessons might be scheduled to take place in a small side room. In this case, we would ensure that the door has a window, or if not, that the door is left open to be in line with safeguarding guidelines.
In addition, all staff receive accredited safeguarding training on a regular basis. We have a director who is fully trained as our designated safeguarding lead. We also ensure staff are inducted into the particular safeguarding policy of their placement school so that Sing Education teachers are made fully aware of all procedures in place at their school to ensure pupil safety.
In addition to safeguarding, we also encourage our teachers to be sure they’re embedded in their school’s own behaviour policies and rules. This way they can – using positive language within the music lesson – reinforce schoolwide objectives and standards. For instance, if a school has a rule not to rush across the classroom, our teacher will reinforce that by saying, “Fantastic James. I love the way that you walked really sensibly across the classroom to put your instrument away.” We aim for consistency across both the lesson structure and the routine, in the way that the teacher manages the classroom and in the way they use an authoritative voice in the classroom.
This helps tremendously when we have instances of teacher cover or transition between teachers. All our Sing Education teachers employ the same behaviour and classroom management techniques, as well as teach from the same resources. These resources have been specifically developed to encourage consistency and routine for the children. We see minimal disruption and smooth handovers between cover teachers or in the case of teacher transition because children recognize the behaviour cueing. The children instantly recognize the routine of the lessons and so we spend little time worrying about the transition itself and instead move quickly to take up the current musical learning and music-making.
