Chesterfield business’ bid to help primary school teachers around the world teach music lessons confidently

As peripatetic primary music teachers, Pete Jenkins and Corinne Hope were asked ‘How do you teach music, it's so scary?’ all the time by their teaching colleagues.

This, the pair say, fueled them to launch The Musical Me, a not-for-profit organisation which was set up around a year ago and initially only ran Continuing Professional Development (CPD) courses for primary teachers.

But in an effort to improve music education even further, the organisation, which is headquarted in Chesterfield, has now moved to a subscription-based model to give added support to teachers by allowing them to access a range of resources, tips, and tricks to help take their music lessons to the next level.

Pete Jenkins, co-founder of The Musical Me, said: "We have put together a community of primary teachers who are working together to gain more confidence in teaching music.

"That comes through training – we’ve got loads of video training for teachers to browse through at their own pace – and we’ve also got resources, such as worksheets that they can take straight into their lessons.

"We take requests from members and are constantly talking to primary teachers about what they need and what could help them teach music more confidently.

"We’re all about supporting the primary music curriculum and supporting teachers who are teaching that curriculum.”

Resources offered by The Musical Me includes a songbank full of popular play-along music sheets for various instruments, from drums to the recorder.

Pete added: “We don’t tell anyone what to teach, we just tell them the background on music.

"For instance, in PGCE year of teacher training, some people that we’ve talked to only have between four and eight hours a year on music. In a PGCE year you’ll have English, maths, science and things like that; that will be constant but music is just tucked into this corner.

“For some teachers that have a previous music background, that’s fine but for most they're reliant on schemes of work... they never give teachers the music knowledge to go behind that and that’s what we’re supporting with.”

For more details on The Musical Me subscriptions visit www.themusicalme.com.

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