• “Creating a Thinking School using the Pop4Schools programme...where Pop Music and Education meet”.

Pop4Schools is a unique, innovative education resource that uses the pop music industry as a vehicle to engage pupils’ learning in key curriculum subjects. Far more than teaching music alone, subjects covered with Pop4Schools can include literacy, maths, science, ICT, art, history, geography and PSHCE.

Pop4Schools has been created by teachers for teachers, including one of the  Kestrel Thinking Skills trainers, Rachel Jacob, Head of Hillcross Primary School in Merton, Surrey (previously Headteacher at Stanley Park Infants School).  Rachel and other teachers have worked closely with music industry specialists to devise this new website.

Pop4Schools takes learning to a different level: it’s fun and children are inspired to learn because pop music is around us all day, every day.

So, how does it work?

Pop4Schools is an online repository of information about the pop music industry.  We’ve compiled resources as diverse as a film about how to write a great pop song, to how a CD is made, and what happens in the studio,  right through to 17 short interviews with music industry professionals, telling you how their role fits in to the process of making great pop music. We’ve also written a set of lesson plans, with all the resources you need, to start you off on your Pop4Schools journey. You can use these pre- written Blooms Taxonomy plans to take your class behind the scenes of the pop music process and integrate a whole range of thinking tools along the way. Your pupils can take on the different roles, such as a composer, performer or studio engineer… or how about marketing, promotion or Finance Director? There are seventeen roles to choose from to enable you to match the strengths of your class to key aspects of the jobs. The principles are based on children writing their own lyrics and music, recording the song(s), designing the artwork and then working out ways in which to market and sell their music.

Pop4Schools provides all the tools to do this and the resources are extremely flexible.  It can be used with any age group, mainly aimed at primary but up to KS3, and it can be taught as a mini enterprise project, cross curricular, subject by subject or as an after school club.  Its great for fundraising too, as you can sell CD’s or digital downloads to raise money for a charity or your school should you choose to.  Needless to say, we’ve made every step as easy as possible for you – guidance on how to teach music composition? Included. Free methods to record your CD? Included. Details of how to upload your schools tracks to iTunes? We’ve got that, too. Even if you aren’t familiar with the latest chart sounds, you can teach using Pop4Schools with ease.

You can read more about how Pop4Schools integrates well with the Thinking Skills modules by reading Rachel’s article click here.

Pop4Schools and Kestrel are proud to be working together   pop4schools website