Charanga Musical School
For Primary Teachers
The award-winning, modern-day resource for primary music.
Charanga Musical School features in the Essex Music Hub e-learning package. All schools subscribing to the package will continue to access the programme with no additional cost.
- The UK’s leading Scheme to teach the National Curriculum for Music
- New Model Music Curriculum Scheme, Scheme builder and creative apps
- A vast library of songs, resources and listening activities celebrating the world’s greatest music
- Support for blended and home learning, assessment and SEND
- Used by over 70,000 teachers
“I have just explored the resources and they are AMAZING!!! I have done lots of Kodály training and am so excited about using the resources.” — Grainne Naylor, Notre Dame School, Liverpool
Scheme
A complete Scheme of Work for your school
The Musical School Scheme provides teachers with week-by-week lessons for each year group in the school, from ages 5–11. It is ideal for specialist and non-specialist teachers and provides lesson plans, assessment, clear progression, and engaging and exciting whiteboard resources for every lesson. The Scheme supports all the requirements of the national curriculum and is absolutely in line with published Ofsted guidance.
Musical School Learning
The learning within this Scheme is based on: Listening and Appraising; Musical Activities — creating and exploring; and Singing and Performing. Everything is clearly and simply explained and the planning support is extensive.
Interactive Teaching Resources
Because the on-screen resources are so visual and supportive and everything is at your fingertips, every lesson is full of music and the children enjoy every moment.
Musical School Assessment
We’ve looked at all the great thinking that has been done on assessment and created an easy-to-use framework that’s useful for both music specialists and non-specialists. In essence, there are three aspects to the assessment:
- End of Key Stage Expectations with the expected musical learning against which to assess
- One-page lesson plans with the facility for you to formatively (continuously) assess
- A digital evidence storage facility to help you build a musical E profile for classes and individual pupils
Regular updates
We constantly seek to improve what we do and in response to the feedback we receive from teachers. Among other things, we regularly refresh the Musical School Scheme, adding more progressive Listening & Appraising and Musical Activities to give you more variety and to challenge students of all ages. Everything is designed to give you flexibility when you need it most and to help you plan for the academic year ahead.
Freestyle
A vast library of music resources
While for many teachers the Scheme may be the part of Charanga Musical School they use the most, many teachers also like the more flexible Freestyle approach provided by the Musical School resource library. From this library, you can choose from a range of music resources which you might want to mix in with your own resources. You can also use the library to find resources linked to many other areas of music-making in your school.
Take a look at what’s in the Musical School Freestyle library
Topics
Songs and other resources for over 30 popular school topics. From Ancient Egypt and Celts & Romans to Energy, School and Healthy Living.
Units
Stand-alone Units of Work for all ages, presented in a flexible way and covering a wide range of musical genres. Some of the units are full-blown musical productions for seasonal festivals including Christmas, Harvest and Diwali.
Instrumental and other courses
Easy-to-teach courses for recorder, ukulele, violin, djembe and more. These excellent easy-to-follow courses provide progressive week-by-week lessons, interactive teaching resources, printouts and planning.
Creative Apps
Rhythm Grids
The Rhythm Grids are great for introducing simple compound 2, 3 and 4-beat time signatures.
Music Explorer
An exciting new app to support lots of different musical activities including pulse games, listening skills, improvising, composing and use of notation.
Percussion Writer
A great way to play along with excerpts from famous works or create your own simple classroom percussion pieces.
Musical Toolkit
Supports the learning and understanding of music concepts such as pulse, rhythm and pitch. The Toolkit contains engaging cartoons which the children will enjoy watching time and time again.
The Musical School Freestyle library
The Freestyle section – one of the latest additions to the programme – is particularly popular.
Listening Centre
This is a colourful collection of music covering a wide range of periods, styles and genres. There are 4 sections:
- Listen by style genre and era with well over 150 musical works to choose from
- Active Listening – a guided Classical music library with questions and answers, fast facts and historical context
- Listening Calendar – library of listening for every month of the year linking musical listening to specific dates
- BBC Ten Pieces – An exciting new BBC-led initiative for primary schools focusing on Classical music and creativity
Charanga Sing
Charanga Sing is a brand new teaching resource aimed at encouraging everyone to sing more!
Extensive research has shown the undeniably positive impact singing has on emotional, physical and mental well-being. This is the reason why singing features so highly in music curricula and on educational agendas – as well as simply being a great thing to do!
Charanga Sing contains a growing bank of over 500 songs presented in a way that is intuitive to use whether by vocal specialists, confident singers or those just keen to encourage more singing every day.
There are songs for all occasions, all ages and for all groupings from soloists to massed choirs. The repertoire covers a wide range of styles, cultures and purposes, with each one carefully picked to be included in the song bank.
100s of songs to enjoy with your pupils + singing courses for younger children
For younger children
A bank of nursery rhymes, action songs, including many old favourites and specially written songs which are perfect for little voices.
Vocal Coach
A vocal health section all about taking care of the voice with fantastic body and vocal warm-ups, exercises and popular tongue twisters.
For older children
A wide range of unison and 2 or more part songs. Some are specially composed or traditional, many are new and very well-known from popular shows, musicals and pop artists – all ideal for encouraging every one of your pupils to sing.
SEND in Musical School
Supporting teachers working with children and young people with special educational needs and disabilities.
At present it consists of a Scheme of ready-made lessons called ‘Anyone Can Play’ AND a Freestyle library section that brings together the most popular Charanga resources from across Musical School as used by teachers in special needs settings around the country.
SEND in Musical School is undergoing much new development work at the moment with the help of some great partners, so watch this space.
Yumu is safe online space where students can learn, play and develop their musicianship. It’s an area of the Charanga platform dedicated to supporting students' music-making between lessons.
You can use Yumu:
- To share the things you’re working on in class, such as songs or recorder pieces, so that your students can practise them at home.
- To set assignments, using your own favourite resources or Charanga’s.
- To provide simple independent learning opportunities, using our ready-made Yumu Packages.
- To track your students’ progress.
Musical School’s impact
The positive evidence is overwhelming with two independent masters’ theses showing that schools using the Charanga Musical School programme have experienced a significant improvement in music teaching and musical achievement.
Our close links with schools through Charanga’s partnerships with over 100 music services and hubs and through the 500 plus Musical School training sessions we run each year, we get a great insight into how effectively the programme is working for teachers.
In addition, our Musical School teacher survey to which we had almost 1000 responses, showed the following highly encouraging feedback from both specialist and non-specialist music teachers.
A survey of teachers using the Musical School programme
| Specialists | Non-Specialists | The impact of Musical School on teachers |
|---|---|---|
| 86% | 89% | Increased CONFIDENCE in their music teaching |
| 72% | 86% | Improvements in their own music-teaching KNOWLEDGE |
| 91% | 90% | Improvements in the QUALITY of their own music teaching |
| 90% | 90% | Increased ENJOYMENT of music teaching |
| 92% | 92% | Improvements in pupil ACHIEVEMENT |
| 96% | 93% | Increased pupil ENJOYMENT of their lessons |
CPD & Training for Musical School
Your Charanga contact
Every teacher has a named Charanga contact – their Regional CPD & Training Manager. Our friendly, experienced team can offer you support and guidance on all aspects of teaching and learning. To meet them and to find out who your own contact is, visit the CPD & Training Centre at the top of the screen once you’ve logged in.
CPD & Training Centre
To complement the superb resources Musical School provides, you’ll find a dedicated CPD & Training Centre on the platform. Visit the Centre to find out about our events, our people and much more!
Equipping teachers to teach music
We are committed to ensuring teachers feel as equipped and confident as possible to teach music brilliantly – so much so that our expert team has already successfully trained over 35,000 teachers in modern, inclusive music-teaching practice.
Free CPD & Training events
Before the COVID pandemic, we organised over 600 events every year, most commonly as twilight sessions – and free, as part of your full licence or trial. During this past year, we’ve instead offered thousands of complimentary webinar places to teachers. These events have either been organised in partnership with Music Education Hubs and Music Services or run centrally.
Looking ahead, we’ll provide a mixed programme of events (you’ve guessed it, for free!) offering teachers face to face workshops, live webinars and recorded sessions to make them as accessible as possible. We’ll cover themes such as Teaching and Learning, Music Leaders, Special Needs and Musical Activities to ensure there are relevant and useful sessions for everyone.
Free technical support
As well as our Help section, found at the top of the screen once you’ve logged in, we offer technical support should you or your IT coordinator need it. With tens of thousands of teachers around the world using Charanga daily, all issues are solved quickly and easily.
Getting in touch
We love to hear about your successes, ideas and suggestions for using Charanga, so please tweet @CharangaMusic or @CharangaScot; contact your Regional CPD & Training Manager; or email training@charanga.com. If you would like any help with a trial or licence, you can reach the team at info@charanga.com.
In-school training — just for your school
If you would like to book a bespoke session for your school, this can be arranged. A session of up to an 1½ hour costs just £150 +VAT. Longer or multi school sessions can also be provided. Simply email your Regional CPD & Training Manager or contact or training@charanga.com for pricing and more information.
Arrange Training
To arrange your training session contact training@charanga.com.
Frequently Asked Questions
How does the free trial work?
Sign up and we will send you a login which will be active for 30 days. We don’t ask for any payment details. At the end of the trial, you can choose to order Musical School and keep the same login details, or simply allow the trial to expire.
How much does it cost?
Musical School for primaries does not cost more than £295 per annum – it’s often less. It differs around the country based on how much the programme is supported by your local music hub, authority or MAT, and the size of school. Find out the exact cost for your school.
What does Charanga mean?
It’s a small musical band often linked to Cuban music. We thought it was a great name for a music education company. We're all a bit partial to the Latin music vibe too!
