Qualifying to Teach Primary Music

With so few ITE courses offering anything other than a few hours of music training, how can primary teachers make sure they have the right skills to teach music?

With many schools covering PPA with external music provision, how can musicians ensure that they are suitably qualified to teach in a curriculum setting?

Perhaps the Level 4 Certificate for Music Educators could be the answer to both these questions...

The Level 4 Certificate for Music Educators (Trinity CME) was developed in 2012 as part of the National Plan for Music Education, to provide a recognized qualification for music educators working with children and young people. Since then around 300 learners across the UK have engaged with this qualification, many of whom have come through our own Distance Learning centre for the qualification at Music Education Solutions®.

The Trinity CME is suitable for anyone who works as a music educator with children and young people, including those working in a primary teaching context. The beauty of this qualification is that it is tailored to the context in which you work, so you don’t have to have musical qualifications to be able to take it. You just have to show that you have the necessary level of skill to teach the pupils that you have at the time of applying. Even the most musically timid of primary teachers will acknowledge that they should be able to do what they’re asking a 7 year-old to do, and that is all that is required as a starting point! (Of course, if you want to teach Grade 8 Trombone, then the requirements are going to be somewhat different!)

The Trinity CME assesses learners in:

• Understanding how children learn music

• Planning, facilitating and evaluating their musical learning

• Reflective practice and professional development

• Promoting positive behaviour

• Equality, diversity and inclusion

• Safeguarding

For fairly obvious reasons, we tend to find that the primary teachers who take the qualification benefit most from the first two areas, since these are the most subject-specific, and also from the fourth area, because it deals with behaviour in a musical setting – that is to say in a lesson that is unusually noisy and exciting! For musicians making their way into teaching, it is almost the exact opposite, as it’s often their first introduction to concepts like safeguarding and inclusion. The brilliance of the qualification is that it takes into consideration your prior learning, so if you’ve already done safeguarding training, you won’t need to do as much work for the final area as someone coming to it brand new would.

Learner Feedback

Feedback from our completed learners has been overwhelmingly positive, with all of them getting real benefit from the qualification despite their differing starting points. The ability to study flexibly through distance learning is also a big draw for time and budget-limited teachers, as well as the support offered by our experienced 1-2-1 mentors for the qualification.

To find out more, watch our 30-minute webinar about the qualification here: https://www.ism.org/professional-development/webinars/distancelearning-for-music-educators