Bringing the World to your classroom

It was 17-years ago that my wife, Jacqui who was then a head of drama in a school in Surrey, came home from teaching at school one day and suggested that we move abroad to learn more about how music, dance and drama were taught in other cultures. We spent a fabulous year living on the wonderful tropical island of Bali, and set up Inspire-works upon our return in the summer of 2003. It soon became apparent that we needed to expand so started to employ other world-music workshops facilitators who were experts in other world-music genres. Today, we’ve got 15 facilitators who deliver workshops to over 70,000 children per year.

Over the past 15 years we’ve seen many changes in music education in both what is taught and the skill set of class teachers, so we’ve come to realise our role has therefore had to change too! 15 years ago it was quite rare to find a school with a full set of djembes or a samba kit - today, djembes and samba instruments are everywhere! We’ve also seen the confidence of primary school class teachers grow in leading whole-class drumming projects over the years so our facilitators are now often taking the role of leading masterclasses and the weekly drumming sessions are being led by the school staff.

About 2 years ago we realised that although many class teachers are confident enough to lead a drumming project, what was lacking were good quality teaching resources that would not only teach the children about the music, but about the culture from which the music comes from, something that has always been at the core of Inspire-works’ aims and philosophy.

We were fortunate to be part of A New Direction’s Arts Award Action Research Project in 2017 which enabled us to pilot our Online Learning Platform across many primary schools in London which we hoped would provide good quality resources for schools at an affordable price and meet the current need in schools. The vision of our Online Learning Platform was to be able to bring our facilitators into the classroom via video who would teach high quality music appropriate for the age group, for the children to be able to use whatever drums or percussion instruments available and for the lessons to be constructed in such a way that they could be led by a non-music specialist class teacher if required but also have extension possibilities if the project was led by a musically able class teacher. We decided to structure each online course around lots of short video clips which the classes would drum along to, use creative online quizzes to back up the learning and use Arts Award Discover as the framework for the learning so that if the school has an Arts Award Adviser on staff, all the pupils would be able to achieve their Arts Award Discover qualification with minimal extra workload for the class teacher.

Over the past 18 months, we’ve used almost every school holiday to film more online courses and anticipate will continue to add to the Online Learning Platform over the next few years as the demand grows! We’ve now got online courses for African drumming, Brazilian samba drumming, Indian dhol and cajon. We’re also currently editing our Percussion with Early Years Courses and Drumming for Health & Well-being Courses ready for the new academic year in September.

Since we started Inspire-works 15 years ago, we’ve worked almost exclusively in the south-east of England as that is where our facilitators are all based. A little like Heineken, our Online Learning Platform has helped us reach parts that our other workshops couldn’t reach! We’ve now got many schools in music hubs as far north as North Tyneside & Sunderland Music Hub, and as far south-west as Devon Music Hub using our Online Learning Platform as the core part of the weekly First Access Programmes. We’ve also had schools in Australia, Russia and the middle-east using the courses!

We’ve found many schools are using non-music specialist teachers to lead the lessons to much great success. We’ve also been getting lots of encouraging feedback from music specialists who are enjoying being able to carry out much more thorough assessments on the children than previously as the teacher is not required to play themselves whilst the children are being led by the Inspire-works facilitators on the screen.

We were very proud early this year have our Online Learning Platform selected as a finalist in the Music Teacher Awards Outstanding Digital/Technological Resource and to be the winners of the Best Instrumental Resource category of the Primary Music Magazine Awards.

Further information on Inspire-works’ online learning platform, including packages and prices is available at www.inspire-works.co.uk/onlinelearning