Introducing Elemental

On my desk I have a list, a long and hopeful list, of the ways in which I would support music teaching if I were King. Highly paid directors of music – tick. With as many staff as PE – tick. And time off on concert days, subsidies for supporting pupils from low-income families and lovely big spacious rooms for making music. Among the hoped for changes would be protected, undirected time for thinking and planning. Sometimes as a music teacher once you're on the hamster wheel it is hard to find the moments one needs to make good long-term improvements.

Around 2018-2022 I had the fortune to be gifted some of this thinking time when I was involved in writing the Department for Education's Model Music Curriculum followed by a period at Ofsted working on their research review in music. 15 years into my career I suddenly had sections of the week hived off for speaking to other music teachers, seeing effective departments (most memorably the fabulous one at ARK Isaac Newton) and spending large amounts of time reading as widely as possible.

There were many revelations and changes that came into my professional life as a result of this time. One of the most impactful was thoroughly engaging with the work of Daisy Christodoulou and in particular her thinking around complex tasks and their components. Alongside the work of Stanislas Dehaene her writing convinced me that the musical response to a knowledge rich approach to curriculum is to use carefully chosen examples as the 'knowledge' that supports conceptual understanding of musical components. These instances of musical knowledge can then come together as students build the complex schema needed as they develop their understanding of music.

As a result of this thinking, and many hours of creating musical examples, has sprung a new platform to support the profession in teaching musical concepts musically. The platform is called Elemental and uses custom built technology to support students with:

• banks of examples of abstract concepts
• alongside close non-examples to support understanding of where the boundaries of the concept lie
• custom made examples, either chosen from out of copyright repertoire or newly composed
• student accounts for independent revision

And to support teachers with:

• homework consisting entirely of sound
• homework which takes under a minute to set and is self-marking
• enabling pupils who, for instance, do not play in an orchestra to build up their aural understanding of instruments they will need to recognise at GCSE
• 500 examples of concepts that all GCSE and A level pupils need to know
• further custom-made examples on request

Elemental is now in beta-testing and we are working hard towards providing a platform that will improve learning while saving teacher time in time for this summer's public exams. If you want to know more, or sign up for a free trial during the beta-testing phase, then drop us an email and we'll sort out a demo.