By Jane Mitchell, Artistic Director, Aurora Orchestra
At Aurora Orchestra we spend all of our time thinking about how to reach and move people with orchestral music. The ways in which we do this vary enormously, from opening up symphonic works and performing from memory at the BBC Proms to inviting our audience to lie down amongst musicians in our late-night series. One of the initiatives we feel most proud of is our Far Far Away (FFA)series, which presents immersive storytelling concerts for children in EYFS in KS1.
When we perform our FFA concerts to families and schools we can immediately see the powerful impact music has on the young people attending. But we’re very aware that we are lucky at Aurora Orchestra – we have access to some of the best instrumentalists in the UK and our creative team has years of music training and performance experience to build our work on. We know that being confident in using music to engage young people does not necessarily happen easily.
Over the past 10 years through our FFA series, we have built up relationships with primary schools, running CPD sessions and developing resources for teachers as well as performing regularly to pupils. This has been fantastic, but around five-years-ago we began really thinking about how we could make this work go further.
Firstly – we wanted to find a way to leave teachers with more tools to use in the classroom. Seeing the children’s responses to our ideas, we wanted to find a way to give these over to teachers to use themselves. It’s easy for arts organisations to go into schools and deliver lovely creative projects, but it’s also expensive. At Aurora we’ve always felt that the way to reach more children sustainably and regularly would be to find a way to collaborate really deeply with teachers.
We’ve also become increasingly struck by how powerful children’s responses are to seeing instruments played to a very high standard. We believe quality matters to children – we’ve seen whole classes respond when something is beautifully phrased or a particular colour of an instrument enters a piece of music. And so, we started thinking about how we could use our musicians to make recordings and films that a teacher could have to hand, to use for music, but also for any part of the school day.
As 2020 brought a pause to our live activity we spent a lot of time thinking about how we might answer these thoughts, and decided to create one of our most experimental projects yet – Aurora Classroom. We built a set of online resources made up of 100s of films and recordings presented as part of flexible libraries and structured units of work. At the heart of Aurora Classroom is the idea that given the right support and resources, all teachers should feel they are able to use music in the classroom regularly and confidently.
We realised from the start of this project that if you want to support teachers who don’t feel very confident teaching music you cannot do this lightly. Our team at Aurora know more than anyone that one of the main reasons we can do what we do is that we are sitting on years and years of music training. We didn’t want to provide something that suggested ‘you don’t need to know anything’ because we don’t believe this. Instead, we thought and talked and piloted until we found a way to provide a resource which combines our music expertise with layers of scaffolding, enabling teachers to lean on us as much and for as long as they need.
One of the main ways we’ve done this for our KS2 and Early Years programmes is by creating a simple tab system for every activity so teachers can choose to lead themselves, using high-quality audio recorded by Aurora’s musicians and a detailed plan, or they can choose to follow a film with their class, and have an Aurora workshop leader lead the activity. Through focus groups and pilots in schools we found that teachers really appreciated the flexibility built into this, so that the decision to lead something themselves could be made at any point.
As this resource developed we knew we wanted real expertise central to these resources and so one of the first things we did as soon as we could was to welcome two primary school music specialists onto our staff. As we had suspected, combining the worlds of concerts and classrooms unleashed a whole new way of thinking about reaching children and we are all learning so much about each other’s worlds. We’ve now made over 400 films and recordings for primary schools and yet, it absolutely feels like the tip of a very exciting iceberg!
