At Norfolk Community Primary School, we believe that every child is a musician. We value and respect each child's unique voice, and our vision is to deliver an inspiring, high-quality, and inclusive music curriculum that fosters creativity, builds self-confidence, and nurtures a lifelong love of music.
Developed in conjunction with the Kapow Primary scheme of work, our music curriculum meets all statutory requirements of the National Curriculum (2014).
The Kapow Primary Music scheme is designed to help pupils recognise themselves as musical and to nurture a lifelong love of music.
The scheme develops the skills, knowledge, and understanding needed to become confident performers, composers, and listeners. The curriculum introduces pupils to music from across the world, encouraging respect and appreciation for the music of all traditions and communities.
Pupils build musical skills through singing, playing tuned and untuned instruments, improvising, composing and listening and responding to music. They develop an understanding of the historical and cultural context of the music they encounter and learn how music can be notated.
The scheme also supports the development of transferable skills, including teamwork, leadership, creative thinking, problem-solving, decision-making and presentation and performance abilities. These skills are integral to pupils’ development as learners and have wide application in their lives beyond school.
Music is taught as a regular, weekly subject from EYFS to Year 6. We follow a spiral curriculum model in which key concepts and skills are revisited in a cyclical manner. Each time a concept is revisited, it is covered with greater depth, allowing pupils to build securely on prior foundations.
Our lessons are built around five core developmental strands that guide our pupils’ journey:
👂 Listening and Evaluating: Developing a critical ear to recognize how music is constructed, explore the history of music, and appreciate a diverse range of genres and cultures.
💨 Creating Sound: Mastering technical control over instruments and the singing voice, including posture, fine-motor coordination, and breath control.
🎼 Notation: Learning to decode and read staff notation progressively, allowing children to "work out" simple pieces of music rather than relying solely on memory.
🎸 Improvising and Composing: Creating music both spontaneously (improvising) and structurally (planning and organizing sounds into cohesive compositions).
🎤 Performing (Singing & Playing): Bringing skills together in collaborative ensemble rehearsals and performances that build confidence, teamwork, and self-esteem.
These five strands are underpinned at every stage by the inter-related dimensions of music (the fundamental building blocks): pitch, duration (pulse and rhythm), dynamics, tempo, timbre, texture, structure, and notation.
Our children get hands-on experience with an array of instruments, progressively building their motor and coordination skills:
Untuned Instruments (Rhythm & Beat): In Key Stage 1, children use instruments like claves, woodblocks, drums, triangles, and maracas to develop bilateral motor control and keep a steady pulse.
Tuned Instruments (Melody & Harmony): As they progress, children learn to play pitched percussion instruments such as glockenspiels, chime bars, and keyboards which require precise hand-eye coordination.
To satisfy the DfE’s Model Music Curriculum recommendations, Key Stage 2 pupils take part in a progressive Whole-Class Instrumental Scheme. This scheme focuses on tuned percussion because they are highly accessible and excellent for visual learning of notation. This program focuses deeply on technical ability to allow pupils to play with genuine expression. It takes pupils on a global musical journey across six progressive units:
🇿🇦 South Africa (Gumboot style playing)
🇧🇸 Caribbean (Calypso rhythm & syncopation)
🇧🇷 South America (Salsa syncopations)
🇮🇩 Indonesia (Gamelan structures)
🇮🇳 India (Bollywood film textures)
🇺🇸 North America (Minimalist structures)
We connect our weekly musical studies to our school's six Big Ideas, ensuring that children understand music as a powerful historical, social, and emotional force:
🕊️ Peace & Freedom: Music is a universal language. Our pupils explore how collaborative singing and playing in an ensemble require deep listening, mutual respect, and compromise, demonstrating how harmony can be achieved when individuals work together.
🌍 Sustainability & Environment: Children learn to find music in the world around them. Whether creating soundscapes of crashing waves in Year 1 (Seaside) or layering complex rhythmic patterns in Year 4 (Rainforests), they use acoustic elements to reflect upon and appreciate the natural world.
⚖️ Equity & Social Justice: Our music history units explore how communities have used music to protest, survive, and demand fairness. From looking at the origins of the Blues in Year 5 to the history behind Songs of World War II in Year 6, pupils discover how marginalized groups have used song to make their voices heard.
🤝 Diversity & Identity: Norfolk citizens explore a truly global range of music. Our curriculum intentionally highlights female and male composers, traditional classical music, and contemporary artists from every continent. Pupils explore Indian classical music, West African call-and-response, Samba, Gamelan, and Bollywood, fostering a deep respect for global heritages.
🗳️ Participation & Citizenship: Rehearsing and performing is an active exercise in citizenship. By learning the group practice process—listening, dividing pieces into sections, practicing slow, evaluating mistakes, and increasing tempo—our pupils learn to negotiate, take responsibility for their part, and participate in collective successes.
🍎 Health & Wellbeing: Musical engagement sits at the heart of personal wellbeing. Singing builds physical control, deep breathing releases tension, and improvising provides a safe, non-verbal space for emotional expression. Our "no mistakes" approach to sketch-composition builds resilience and self-esteem.
In Foundation Stage (FS1 & FS2), music is seamlessly integrated into daily play and structured learning, targeting the Development Matters: Expressive Arts and Design goals:
Exploring Sound: Children experiment freely with their voices, body percussion, and instruments, learning to recognize environmental sounds and simple tempos.
Music and Movement: Young learners create actions to match beats, express feelings through physical responses to music, and enjoy collaborative singing games.
Continuous provision: We provide an environment rich in musical stimuli, integrating Drawing Club narratives and Squiggle Whilst you Wiggle mark-making to build the fine and gross motor skills required for future instrumental control.
The ultimate impact of our music curriculum is that pupils leave Norfolk Community Primary School as confident, expressive, and culturally literate musicians who can appreciate, perform, and critique music.
We monitor progress and success through a balanced approach to assessment:
Formative Assessment (Retrieve & Support): Every lesson begins with a Recap and recall session to strengthen retrieval practice. Teachers utilize "Assessing progress and understanding" checkpoints during activities to support non-specialist staff in identifying children who need extra scaffolding or greater depth challenges.
Summative Assessment (Evaluate & Track): At the end of each unit, children complete a creative assessment quiz containing audio clips, allowing them to apply their listening skills.
Performance Portfolios: Teachers regularly take audio and video recordings of group practice and final performances. These act as a digital portfolio of children's musical growth, allowing pupils to self-evaluate and take pride in their progress over time.
Our Goal: Every child leaves Norfolk Community Primary School equipped with the musical vocabulary, practical instrumental capability, and historical appreciation necessary to enjoy, create, and participate in the musical tapestry of the modern world.
Music overview
Purpose of study
The aim of our music curriculum is to inspire and challenge all pupils by equipping them with the knowledge and skills to develop a love of music. As pupils progress they should develop an engagement with music, exploring and listening to a range of famous composers and performers and developing their composing and improvisation skills. Pupils are also given opportunities to develop their singing and performing skills in a range of supportive and encouraging environments.
Aims
The national curriculum for music aims to ensure that all pupils:
perform, listen to, review and evaluate music across a range of historical periods, genres,
styles and traditions, including the works of the great composers and musicians
learn to sing and to use their voices, to create and compose music on their own and with others, have the opportunity to learn a musical instrument, use technology appropriately and have the opportunity to progress to the next level of musical excellence
understand and explore how music is created, produced and communicated, including through the inter-related dimensions: pitch, duration, dynamics, tempo, timbre, texture, structure and appropriate musical notations.
Subject content
Key stage 1
use their voices expressively and creatively by singing songs and speaking chants and rhymes
play tuned and untuned instruments musically
listen with concentration and understanding to a range of high-quality live and recorded music
experiment with, create, select and combine sounds using the inter-related dimensions of music.
Key Stage Two
Pupils in Key Stage Two will be taught to
play and perform in solo and ensemble contexts, using their voices and playing musical instruments with increasing accuracy, fluency, control and expression
improvise and compose music for a range of purposes using the inter-related dimensions of music
listen with attention to detail and recall sounds with increasing aural memory
use and understand staff and other musical notations
appreciate and understand a wide range of high-quality live and recorded music drawn from different traditions and from great composers and musicians
develop an understanding of the history of music.