A Day In The Life Of… The Music Department

Our day begins at around 7:30am with a freshly brewed coffee to accompany some administration tasks to set the day up. Mostly, this involves collating timetables sent in by our peripatetic teachers and emailing the lesson times out to students and year teams on the relevant day, planning lessons for upcoming classes and writing a to-do list for any departmental tasks that need completing. At 8:40am, Miss Beckwith heads off to meet her tutor group to complete the range of activities from the programme and Miss Doe continues with departmental admin.

Once 9:05am comes around, both music teachers begin their teaching day, which is a varied mix of year groups, music courses and for Miss Beckwith, a teacher of Music, Drama and Life Skills, subjects! A typical lesson in the music department is mainly comprised of practical elements e.g. playing instruments or recording on Cubase, as a way of developing skills, learning key terminology and genre information. This often makes our lessons very busy, as students ‘break out’ into our practice rooms, use lots of instruments and equipment, as well as play at quite a loud volume…!

Break and lunch times for a lot of the week are ‘open sessions’ for students to book practice rooms to play instruments with their friends. Due to the busy nature of this, we now operate a digital booking system, which students can either book from home or via one of the music teachers – this administration is carried out throughout the day and, “Which practice room am I in at break?” is quite often a question we’re asked as we’re walking down the corridor! Students are usually in-and-out of our office, collecting drum sticks, plectrums and asking if we can listen to songs they have been practicing.

Most days, there will be a ‘non-contact’ period, which is one hour during the school day where we are able to complete team priorities. At the start of the hour, we usually have a very quick reset of the department, putting away equipment that might have been accidentally left out, but predominantly the time is given to marking student work and providing feedback on the tasks completed during the lesson. In coursework periods of the year, non-contact time is spent marking and moderating portfolios, collating students’ work and uploading it to the exam board portals – this can be quite stressful to juggle with everyday teaching and other administration that has to be completed!

After school activities can be quite varied, but the most pressing extra-curricular group is the school production between September and December, where we guide the students to rehearse every Monday for three months before it increases to extra sessions leading up to show week. Whilst this is an extremely demanding aspect of our role, it is hugely rewarding and the show nights are quite often our favourite evenings of the academic year. In addition, weekly after school groups can range from coursework sessions, preparing for awards evenings, recording sessions and any extra rehearsals our bands need to carry out. These after school groups often extend into evening events, where you may have seen our bands play at the Laser Light Show celebration in Leighton Buzzard town centre or Battle of the Bands at The Stables. The music team also try to attend any band nights that the students play at to give them extra support – we even took a half term trip to the Craufurd Arms in Wolverton!