Welcome to School21's music department website, a platform for sharing our work with the School21 and wider education community. Our team comprises four full time classroom music teachers, one music manager and eleven instrumental teachers,. We are passionate about rich curriculum design, inclusive excellence and building ensemble. We predominantly work with a diverse community of 1100 students aged 4-18 in Stratford, East London, but are always keen to explore opportunities to collaborate and build relationships with our wider community, through music making and project collaborations.
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Across our website you can explore:
If you'd like to connect with the team or come and visit, please email [email protected] or use the contact form at the bottom of this page |
OUR VISION & VALUES
We believe that a rich music curriculum should be informed by carefully chosen values and present opportunities to explore music beyond a checklist of skills & declarative knowledge.
INCLUSIVE EXCELLENCE: MUSIC IS FOR EVERYONE
We believe all our students are capable of creating and doing amazing things through music and this ambition also extends to our school parents and carers. We are very proud of our community choir, which we first started in September 2017. The choir rehearse every other Friday from 4.15-5.15pm, perform at our end of term concerts and take part in other community projects. It is an inclusive choir open to all students, staff, parents and friends of the school. You can see some of our work with the choir below.
When you come to one of our annual School21 Festival of Light concerts, featured in the video above, you will see, not only the community choir, but also every child in the school sharing the products of their Autumn term music curriculum projects. As well as this, all children across the school join forces for a finale performed over a four concert series. You'll also see up to 50 teachers coming together to perform in the staff choir. We promote these activities because we believe that through building ensemble across our entire school community, we can build a great culture of music making & wider collaboration, as well as supporting the well-being and belonging of everyone who works at School21.
You can read an article about the story of our community choir so far, written as part of a collection of essays on ‘Schools in Their Communities'
schoolsweek.co.uk/schools_in_their_communities/
schoolsweek.co.uk/schools_in_their_communities/
Living Out Our Values
We can summarise our curricula through statements of intent and cool infographics, but how much does this tell us about what they really look like in action? To celebrate the five year journey of our 2014-2018 cohort, we created this video, sharing a number of key music curriculum moments of an individual year group over a five year journey, and recognising our students' commitment to living out the values it embodies. The cohort featured here went onto achieve outstanding GCSE music results which were nationally recognised as being among the best in the country, and have since gone onto achieve top grades at A Level music and head off to fantastic universities to study a wide range of degree subjects . They also helped shape the music culture which now sits at the heart of our school.