Leaps and Bounds Impact Report – teacher engagement with EYFS creative music-making

When we began our project, we wanted to measure teacher engagement in planning, delivering and supporting colleagues with creative music-making activity for early years’ children to benchmark current levels at the start of our project to see if there was a positive impact as we worked with our settings.

Recognising the need to avoid unnecessary paperwork and form-filling, I decided to use the Pupil Voice evaluation app, developed by Edsential to gather feedback for curriculum activity both in and out of school: we have used the app in our music sessions and it keeps the focus on music-making, rather than lengthy written evaluations which can ‘dull’ a creative experience.

You can see further information about the app here.

I set the following questions and asked our tutors delivering in schools to get responses from those practitioners delivering music with the EYFS class; teachers and TAs, and they selected their answer.

For example:

Do you enjoy music lessons with EYFS?

We repeated the same set of questions in our second year of delivery and the answers, I believe, shows the impact of our project as well as where we practitioners still feel they need support. There is a difference in the numbers completing the survey because this ‘snapshot’ was taken prior to our delivery on the Nursery settings in Term 2.

Looking at the figures, I can see a level of enjoyment in our teachers delivering singing and music sessions but an initial concern about progression and supporting colleagues in planning and delivery which has been improved between years one and two through engagement in the project. The number and regularity of the sessions has also increased through this project.

Our project, Leaps and Bounds, has been a combination of fortnightly team-taught delivery (F2 classes), ten weekly sessions (F1 classes), networking meetings (termly) full day CPD for EYFS practitioners, a Music Roadshow (one visit per setting) and  singing event for settings to come together in a cultural venue in their locality.

If you would like to know more about this project, please email music@edsential.co.uk