Building Musical Partnerships
Music Initial Teacher Training with Sutton SCITT and Roehampton University
Since 2019, the Sutton Music Education Hub has been working with the PGCE Music team at Sutton SCITT and Roehampton University. This partnership is about supporting trainees to understand the vital partnership Music Hubs have with schools in supporting and developing a rich, broad, and balanced music education for children and young people. Our collaboration was formed with the vision of bringing together holistic musical training for the future secondary classroom specialists and putting practical music-making at the core of their practice. Music teachers of the future must understand the support and specialism that Music Education Hubs bring to their own developing practice and the pupils they teach in school.
Being a pandemic year, practical music-making with the PGCE trainees has been a challenge! In the past, we have jointly run instrumental, choral, and conducting workshops, both at Sutton Music Service and in school. This year due to the pandemic, we had to be more creative. Creativity and adaptability have been central to the work we have done this year. Ensuring our trainees continue to have meaningful music training has been central to our planning. So why not develop and use the online music technology resources available to access music? Exploring and exploiting new resources to support online teaching has supported the trainees in designing engaging, fun and meaningful music lessons. The trainees have engaged with CPD on offer to secondary teachers. Gareth Gay, Head of Music Service, delivered an excellent composition training session online, which helped the trainees understand how to design, plan and deliver practical GCSE composing lessons using ‘Soundtrap’. A change in pedagogical design was embraced, and the trainees have since experimented with this since they have been back in school.
Understanding KS2 whole class music-making is important for trainee teachers, not only to understand the learning phase and curriculum before pupils enter secondary school but also an opportunity to observe and understand whole class music-making and the teaching strategies used for engagement. Whether this will be streamed or ‘live’ is yet to be decided but the trainees with enjoy working with Claire Cossins, Senior Instrumental Curriculum Leader, in the summer term to observe some excellent music-making.
The Sutton SCITT/Roehampton PGCE music cohort value working with the team at Sutton Music Service, lead partner in the Sutton Music Education Hub. We already have plans to develop this partnership further in the next academic year. Whatever happens with the pandemic, working creatively and in collaboration with the Hub is central to our vision of high-quality music training for teachers of the future
Train Locally, Teach Locally
