Crafting your Music Curriculum for 2026
With the Summer Term well underway, SATs nearly behind you, and end of year preparations on the horizon, you may already be turning your thoughts to what your music curriculum will look like next year! We understand how daunting this can feel, with so many options and approaches to consider! Take a look at this blog to support you in creating a music provision of excellence that is National Curriculum aligned, engaging, and stress-free!
What a Music Curriculum should include:
A strong and cohesive music curriculum should be built around the key elements laid out in the National Curriculum: Composing, Listening & Performing. Consolidating key concepts is progressive, so ensuring that these 3 elements are taught cohesively instead of in separate entities is really important. This means that children will be continuously developing their listening skills, compositional techniques and confidence when performing continually throughout the year. Here at Get Set, our units incorporate the three key elements of music in every unit, so you don’t need to worry about coverage and you can rest assured your children by building upon their musical knowledge in a progressive format in every lesson.
Building your curriculum:
When thinking about progression as a whole, as with any subject, it is always a good idea to think about how you can form cross-curricular links with other subjects in your curriculum through your music teaching. This will support your pupils to have deep knowledge of a topic which isn’t isolated to a single subject, really allowing pupils to build a variety of skills and acquiring knowledge in different formats across your lessons.
Links to consider:
- History units. Aligning periods of history with your music curriculum is a great way to provide extra context around musical styles, and support pupils’ understanding around how music has evolved stylistically over time.
- Geography units: Immersing children in a diverse range of repertoire and genres of music is an enormous part of the Model Music Curriculum and the National Curriculum, so considering linking units to your geography topics is a great way to do this. This way, you can study genres from across the world simultaneously with your study of geography of specific countries or continents, adding depth and breadth to the knowledge children are acquiring.
- English: Connecting English texts and stories to music is an excellent way to support your pupils’ acquisition of language. Drawing connections between characters, emotion and music is a brilliant way to demonstrate how music can show emotion, and encourage pupils to think about the emotions they feel when they listen to music.
Choosing EYFS units:
When choosing EYFS units, stories are your best way in. Storytelling is a familiar format and the perfect way to link music to characters, or simply to show how music can tell a multitude of stories, without words. Units that are heavily focused on singing are also especially important for pupil development in EYFS. Songs help broaden pupils’ vocabulary, provide a strong foundation for sentence structure and can inform pupils’ own creative styles.
Choosing KS1 units:
Choosing thematic units, either linked to stories or fairly narrow topics is important for KS1 Music curriculums. Using a specific event in history or study into a country is a great way to start supporting KS1 pupils to draw cross-curricular links, right from the start of Year 1. Continuing to use units that still have a strong singing focus is also important as children will still be continuing to broaden their own vocabulary and understanding of grammar. It’s also a great way to connect key vocabulary from a specific topic.
Choosing KS2 units:
In KS2, your topic selection can be a little broader. By KS2, pupils’ will have a stronger foundation in critical thinking skills and drawing links for themselves across the curriculum and we want to encourage pupils to continue doing so. With a foundation in the key periods of history and study of continents by this point, now is a good time to teach more focused units on musical cultures or traditions across the world. It's also a wonderful opportunity for pupils to connect with one another through music and hear genres that were perhaps unfamiliar to them, or share heritage and experiences of different cultures. Music curriculums should not only teach pupils the key elements of music but encourage them to be life-long musicians as they navigate shaping their own musical tastes.
Curriculum environment:
The environment created for music making is really important. We totally get that the teaching of music can be really overwhelming…from rhythm to western notation and beyond!! Having posters around your room to remind children of key concepts is crucial to support embedding musical features within the long-term memory. Ensuring that your ‘music classroom’ is equipped with enough instruments is imperative. Having glockenspiels to support learning western notation, as well as a wide variety of untuned percussion instruments will help pupils in their understanding of pulse and rhythm. If you’re part of the Get Set family, we’ve got a handy ‘instrument audit’ to help you get your music covered ready for the year ahead and plenty of posters to print in your ‘displays’ folder in ‘Awesome Stuff’!
Immersion in music:
A huge feature of the Model Music Curriculum is to immerse children in a wide range of listening pieces to help them truly understand the nuances within musical traditions and to help them develop their own musical tastes as life-long musicians. Music is such an important medium to connect with others; it’s an opportunity for children to share culture, experiences and opinions with one another, creating unique and important conversations in the classroom. Music doesn’t need to be contained within your music lessons, and shouldn’t be! Consider playing music during some quiet reading, writing up a final draft in English or to wind down after break or wet play! Listening to music is a great way to refocus the mind, relax and ‘retune’ for the rest of the school day.
Delivering your curriculum:
Whilst it’s really important to craft a curriculum that will support young pupils to become life-long musicians, it’s also really important to consider those who are delivering your music curriculum… your teachers! We know that in many primary schools, class teachers deliver music curriculums, so ensuring that teachers feel confident and supported to deliver music lessons is essential. Consider their thoughts when connecting to the wider curriculum in their year groups, or (where budget stretches), think about possible CPD opportunities that might support their own musical understanding, and, in turn, their pupils’ musical understanding through shared development. If you’re part of the Get Set family, you’ll find guided CPD training videos you might wish to support your teachers with in twilight sessions or INSET days!
Selecting songs:
Singing is a really big part of the curriculum and it’s important that pupils have the opportunity to be involved in singing experiences. It’s great for supporting mental health, a sense of school community and, again, more exposure to vocabulary! Singing assemblies are a great way to bring the whole school together, connecting through the medium of song. Choosing songs by theme, perhaps linked to your school values, or celebrations that are widely celebrated in your school are a great way in. Songs that are going to bring your community together in harmony and unity. We’ve got over 20 singing assemblies for you to choose from here at Get Set, as well as songs embedded into every unit on our platform, all written by us to support your young singers!
Extra-Curricular provision:
We know that music provision isn’t just contained within the classroom…there’s so much more to offer! Music provision extends beyond this, and extracurricular programmes are an important part of pupils’ musical education. It’s also a highlighted feature of what we expect to appear in the new National Curriculum framework, so it’s important to think about what your extracurricular provision looks like. Ensuring that you have a variety of musical clubs or groups on offer within your school is an excellent way to support this. Choirs, orchestras, Young Voices club, instrumental ensembles and individual lessons are all excellent ways for children to feel involved in your school’s musical community and help them to continue developing their musical skills outside of your music classroom…it’s a win:win!
We hope this gives you an insight for what to consider when thinking about the academic year ahead, amidst what is already a busy term! If you’d like any support in building your music curriculum…do reach out, we’ll be happy to help