Sing Education’s specialist music provision model puts inclusive teaching at the heart of our classroom experience. Within our team training, educational materials and lesson delivery we are committed to fully addressing SEND and accessibility needs. We also work with heads and classroom teachers to help them make reasonable adjustments when delivering supplemental music activities.
Sing Education believes that good music education begins with an inclusive music education. We are committed to ensuring our lessons and resources are accessible to all children, schools and staff.
Our director, Alice Cadman, has a particular passion for inclusivity and disability, which has led her to take part in a project to empower music teachers to teach children who are blind and partially-sighted, as well as being invited to speak as part of a forum on inclusive music education in the Department for Education’s National Plan for Music and Ofsted’s Model Music Framework in September 2019.
Our lessons are designed to be inclusive in nature, with children accessing the learning through games, percussion, singing, listening, use of props and discussion. The lessons and singing assemblies are led orally, with the need to read music or words being kept to a minimum. We use high contrast and clear fonts on our PowerPoint slides, to ensure they are more accessible to children and staff with dyslexia or visual impairments, and our teachers read out any text from slides, too.
At our team training sessions and within our teaching resources, we aim to raise awareness of SEND and accessibility needs, by providing suggestions and tips to equip teachers to make reasonable adjustments.
In the music classroom, we ensure an inclusive music education by adjusting games or activities to suit a child’s needs. To enable children who are deaf or hard of hearing to participate in the lessons fully, our teachers happily wear any required equipment and make other suitable adjustments to support children. We encourage our team to always be thinking of ways to adapt a movement game, to ensure a child in a wheelchair is able to feel fully included in the activity or to adapt a solo-singing game, to ensure a non-verbal child feels comfortable and engaged.
Time and time again, headteachers comment on the way a child with SEND has engaged with a Sing Education lesson!
