Take a look at your Key Stage 3 music curriculum. How much of the music your pupils know, listen to and identify with is represented in it?
This isn’t a question about how many countries appear in your schemes of work, or whether you’ve managed to squeeze in a ‘world music’ unit somewhere. It’s a bigger question about what your curriculum tells pupils about which music is worth studying.
Music is closely connected to identity. The music young people listen to outside school can be an important part of how they understand themselves, their communities and their place in the world. So what happens when the music that matters to pupils is almost entirely absent from their music lessons?
Relevance doesn’t mean pandering
There can sometimes be a concern that reflecting pupils’ musical interests means simply teaching whatever happens to be popular. It doesn’t.
If your pupils listen to Afrobeats, drill, K-pop, grime, Bollywood or EDM, that doesn’t mean you have to build your entire curriculum around those genres. Nor does it mean that pupils should only study music they already know. But there is value in making connections between the music pupils encounter outside school and the musical concepts, skills and knowledge they encounter inside it.
The music pupils listen to may be considerably more sophisticated than the music they are currently capable of making themselves. They may have a surprisingly detailed understanding of production, structure, timbre, rhythm or performance practice, even if they don’t have the vocabulary to describe it yet. That gives us something to work with.
A pupil who listens to K-pop might have an interesting starting point for exploring arrangement and production. A class familiar with grime might provide a starting point for discussing rhythm, texture, lyrics and technology. A pupil whose family listens to Indian classical music may already have an understanding of musical ideas that are completely unfamiliar to their classmates.
The point isn’t to make music lessons more ‘popular’. It’s to make meaningful connections between pupils’ musical lives and their formal musical education.
Reflect – and broaden
Of course, reflecting your school community doesn’t mean restricting the curriculum to music pupils already know. In fact, a good curriculum needs to both reflect the musical and cultural experiences pupils bring with them and broaden those experiences by introducing pupils to music they might otherwise never encounter.
These two things aren’t in opposition. A pupil might begin with a piece of music they already know and use it as a starting point for exploring an unfamiliar musical tradition. Equally, studying an unfamiliar tradition can give pupils new ways of understanding music they encounter every day. The aim is not familiarity for its own sake. It’s about giving pupils a broader and richer musical education.
Whose music counts?
This also raises an important question about what we mean when we talk about ‘cultural capital’. There has historically been a tendency in Western education to position Western classical music at the top of an assumed hierarchy of musical value. Other musical traditions can then become something pupils encounter as an interesting diversion from the ‘main’ curriculum. But why should we assume that musical traditions need to compete with one another?
Western classical music, Indian classical music, Indonesian gamelan, jazz, hip-hop and popular music have developed within very different musical, cultural and historical contexts. They have different conventions, purposes, sounds and ways of organising musical ideas. Rather than asking which is ‘best’, we can ask: What can pupils learn from this musical tradition? What makes it distinctive? What musical knowledge and skills does it develop? Who created and continues to create this music? What does it tell us about the people and communities associated with it? This allows different musical traditions to be taken seriously without pretending that they are all the same.
Avoiding tokenism
There is also a difference between genuine representation and simply adding a few ‘world music’ lessons to the curriculum. If a musical tradition appears once, is taught primarily through facts about its country of origin and is then never mentioned again, pupils may learn very little about the music itself. Instead, look at the bigger picture. Which musical traditions appear repeatedly in your curriculum? Which musicians and composers are pupils expected to know? Which music is used as a serious example for analysis, composition and performance? Which music is treated as sophisticated, and which is treated as a curiosity? And perhaps most importantly: what assumptions does your curriculum make about what a ‘proper’ music lesson looks like?
A quick curriculum audit
1. Who can see themselves in our curriculum?
Are there musical experiences that pupils recognise from their own lives?
2. Who is missing?
Are there significant communities represented in your school whose musical traditions are almost entirely absent?
3. What do we treat as ‘serious’ music?
Look at the music pupils analyse, perform and compose. Does it reflect a narrow idea of musical value?
4. Are we reflecting and broadening?
Are pupils both seeing connections with their existing musical experiences and encountering music that is new to them?
5. Are we teaching music, rather than just teaching about culture?
Whatever the musical tradition, pupils should be developing meaningful musical knowledge and skills.
A curriculum that belongs to your pupils
A diverse music curriculum isn’t about ticking representation boxes. Nor is it about removing particular musical traditions because they have historically been prioritised. It’s about being thoughtful about why we choose the music we teach and what pupils can learn from it.
Classical music absolutely has a place in the secondary music curriculum. So does popular music. So do the many musical traditions represented within and beyond our school communities. The useful question isn’t ‘Which music is best?’ It’s ‘Why is this music here, what does it allow my pupils to learn, and what other music deserves the same consideration?’ That is a question worth asking every time we review our curriculum.
Dr Liz Stafford. October 2026. Copyright © 2026 Music Education Solutions Limited. All Rights Reserved.
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