Inspiring creative, confident musicians with Oak’s music curriculum

Lifelong engagement with and appreciation of music is fostered through musical understanding. True musical understanding is developed through practical and creative music-making and exploration of sound. The Oak music curriculum embodies this approach to teaching music.

Working with subject experts Bristol Beacon, Amplify Education and other music education experts and professional musicians, our new free, adaptable music curriculum and lesson resources are designed to support you to deliver a high-quality music education that develops your pupils' confidence as musicians.

Explore the curriculum:

• Music curriculum key stages 1-2
• Music curriculum key stages 3-4 including GCSE AQA
• Music curriculum key stages 3-4 including GCSE Edexcel
• Music curriculum key stages 3-4 including GCSE Eduqas
• Music curriculum key stages 3-4 including GCSE OCR

Practical music-making at the centre of learning

Performing, composing and listening are carefully integrated throughout the curriculum, enabling your pupils to develop their musical understanding coherently. Focusing on developing knowledge of music in this way ensures pupils gain a meaningful understanding of the music they are learning about.

Singing sits at the heart of the musical learning at primary level and is embedded in the sequence, providing an accessible starting point for developing musicianship and confidence. At secondary level, the curriculum also offers a range of accompanying song guides to further extend singing skills and allow you to select songs and embed in ways that work best for your pupils.

Bringing music lessons to life through expert modelling

Clear modelling underpins the curriculum, helping your pupils to understand what good music-making looks and sounds like. High-quality video and audio examples complement the slide decks, bringing musical concepts to life and supporting you to deliver challenging lessons that encourage pupils to refine the quality of their musical ideas and responses.

Music contains many abstract concepts, and the curriculum supports you in breaking these down so that your pupils can develop a secure understanding over time. Practical and creative tasks are supported by explicit success criteria which helps you to ensure clarity of explanation and accessibility for the whole class.

The Building an improvisation lesson in the 12-bar blues unit, shows an example of how we break down concepts and support explanations with modelled video. This lesson from the Atmospheric Music unit demonstrates how pupils are encouraged to develop their ideas with concrete examples.

Slide showing the use of success criteria from the lesson Creating an EDM drum beat in the KS3 music lesson unit EDM remixing.

Slide showing the use of success criteria from the The role of the instruments and the bass pattern lesson in the KS3 unit 12-Bar Blues.

Designed with experts to support every teacher

Music can be taught in a wide range of contexts, sometimes by teachers with different levels of subject experience. With this in mind, lesson resources are designed to support both specialists and non-specialists. Clear explanations, structured lesson sequences and expert modelling help you feel confident delivering lessons.

The curriculum has been developed collaboratively with musicians, subject experts and partners to ensure musical authenticity, quality and breadth. Lesson resources celebrate a wide range of musicians, musical traditions and styles, from beatboxing to orchestral music and taiko to reggaeton, allowing pupils to explore music from across the world and broaden their musical awareness through diverse musical voices and experiences.

Aligned with Curriculum and Assessment Review priorities

You will have seen the government's response to the Curriculum and Assessment Review recommendations to revise the national curriculum and update GCSEs and will be thinking ahead.

Specifically, the review highlighted the importance of subject-specific musical learning, carefully sequenced progression, and supporting teachers to build musical understanding through connected rather than isolated curriculum content. The Oak curriculum aligns with these priorities with units that consider the progression of musical skills and knowledge, avoid an overemphasis on genre-specific content, and provide clear outcomes and adaptable support for teachers.

Personalise your lessons with Aila

The Oak music curriculum materials are designed to be ready to use, adaptable as needed, and to save teachers valuable time with planning. Our AI lesson assistant Aila can also help with this. In an intuitive, step-by-step process, you can co-create lessons that start with your learning outcome and adapt for your pupils as you go. Personalise for reading age, add context for your classroom, and download fully editable lesson plans, slide decks, quizzes and worksheets - all in just minutes.

Supporting meaningful musical learning

Music education should give every pupil the opportunity to enjoy making music and to become more musical. Oak’s new music curriculum supports you to make this possible through practical music-making, expert guidance and adaptable lesson resources. By combining strong pedagogy with inclusive and joyful musical experiences, your pupils will develop the confidence, knowledge and curiosity that underpin meaningful musical learning.

If you’re interested to find out more about using our music curriculum, or have questions about how it could work in your school or trust, you can get in touch with me.