Meet the Teacher Martin Ainscough Fred Longworth High School, Wigan

  What motivates you? Getting students involved in making music, and ensuring they all get something from music lessons. Why do you feel that your approach is effective? It starts from students’ own interests and abilities and uses their intrinsic motivation to ensure that they are fully committed to what they are doing – they own the work. We make sure that what we produce in class is public – everything results in a performance, often to another class, or a showcase of work. This also motivates students as they want to sound good in front of their peers! How is student voice valued in your department? We use student voice all the time in an informal way as they make constant choices about their work. Each year we complete a more formal survey using Google Forms – this informs our planning and gives us information such as favourite projects, what music students listen to, what they like/don’t like about music lessons, whether they play an instrument etc. How do you get senior leadership on board? Good communication and making sure they know what is going on in the department. It’s about educating them about what works best in music. This is where the Musical Futures network can come in – there is always someone you can ask for advice, or an expert who is involved in #mufuchat. How do you assess students’ learning? Formative assessment is verbal in order to keep lessons practical, rather than students sat at desks writing feedback. For summative assessment each topic has success criteria that students are scored on using a radar diagram – this gives an overall score which feeds into the school assessment system. We give a written ‘what works well’ and ‘even better if’ for each piece of work. What external partnerships have you built? We have worked closely with the Halle Orchestra on projects across the school. We also use lots of professionals and ex students to enhance learning in the department. For example, if we have students interested in rap or turntabling, then we get someone to come in and work with them as it’s not within any of our areas of expertise.

Is there consistency of approach within your teaching staff? We have a department of three, all with a different approach to teaching, and different skills sets, but this is great when thinking about new ideas and projects as it allows for lots of perspectives. We are all committed to getting students playing music which is at the heart of our ethos as a team. How do you engage with specialist musicians? The local Music Service provides instrumental lessons which parents pay for. We use Pupil Premium funding to reduce the cost for Pupil Premium students. We use specialists to help out with whole class provision funded through the department budget. Give an example of a challenge you have faced recently, and how you have overcome it? Shifting ‘Book scrutiny’ to ‘Work Scrutiny’. We have worked hard to make sure it isn’t books that are looked at in music, instead is video, garageband files, audio etc. We have student workbooks, but they consist of a challenge, success criteria, self assessment, peer assessment and teacher assessment for each project. We discussed the issues with our SLT team, and through being able to justify our position we were able to change what was a pointless exercise into something more meaningful. What ongoing professional development do you and your team have? Lots – but not always by completing courses, I encourage staff to go and look at approaches in different schools and bring ideas back with them. I completed an MSc a few years ago in Leadership, whilst another colleague is currently on a Whole Education Leadership course. She has also recently spent a week in Australia looking at Musical Futures schools, and attending the Musical Futures conference there. We also lead lots of Musical Futures courses, so part of the development here is getting our staff involved in the delivery. We all attended the Music Learning Revolution last year – it was great for us all to be there and to discuss the ideas and workshops together – it helped us to bring a new energy to the department. Do you play music outside of school? Yes I’m in a rock/indie band called ‘Exile on Charles Street’. As most band members are teachers within the school we always play at end of year assemblies – it’s good for the kids to see us making music too! Can you summarise your teaching approach? Informal and personalised. I like to build on the kids interests and motivations so that they are engaged in what they are doing. I don’t like to be too prescriptive in what I want them to do – my favourite part of teaching is about the surprises you get by hearing/seeing really creative ideas – I don’t think this happens if you are too specific about how things should be. https://flhs.org.uk @FLHSMusicDept @AinscNW