Egglescliffe School & Arts College

Keith Hewson, Head of Music at this school specialising in music and drama, explains how "composition has gone through the roof" with the help of Sibelius.

Egglescliffe School’s Music Department has a longstanding reputation for performance work.  Standards are high in both academic and practical work, with students taking Associated Board examinations in addition to GCSE and A level qualifications.  Ensembles are many and various, including an orchestra, brass band, choirs and a chamber orchestra, all of which have participated successfully in the Festival of Music for Youth.  The school orchestra alone has won several outstanding performance awards in recent years – and even appeared on the BBC’s Blue Peter!  With performances at world-famous venues such as the Royal Albert Hall, many students have progressed to careers in the music world.

In 1999, Egglescliffe was designated as a performing arts college – specialising in music and drama – and since then refurbishment of the music block transformed the interior structure of the department.  The teaching rooms were completely redesigned each with two adjoining rehearsal rooms with computer facilities.  Eleven acoustically designed practice rooms, an additional computing area, a recording studio and a new rehearsal room were created.

Keith Hewson, Head of Music at Egglescliffe, had a very particular vision of how he wanted the curriculum to move forward within the Arts College.  He wanted to see composition develop rapidly to meet the standards already achieved in performance.  In order to realise this aim he intended to introduce composition focused ICT on a major scale, not just at KS4 but also at KS3.

The choice of music software was an important decision.  The collective intention of the department was to integrate ICT into every KS3 lesson and to ensure continuity in the use of the computing facilities from Year 7 right through to Year 13.  Furthermore, the department intended to retain a strong focus on notation and hoped to strongly link the ICT work with other areas of the classroom within a project-based structure.  These pre-requisites left the department with only one realistic choice - Sibelius.

Keith says, “Sibelius is a powerful notation based program that also generates playback based on a simple and flexible General MIDI system.  I was convinced that Sibelius had the potential to be usable and accessible at KS3 and was the perfect package for GCSE and A level composition.  Sibelius undoubtedly met all the needs of the department in the curriculum area”.

Over the last five years, the Music Department has gone from strength to strength and Sibelius is in constant use – before school, at lunch time and after school by KS3 students as well as exam groups.  Keith comments, “Since 1999, composition has gone through the roof!  Students are using the software from years 7 to 13 – and because I’ve been using Sibelius in my outreach work with primary schools, students are coming to Egglescliffe already familiar with the software and raring to go.  Sibelius has had a terrific impact!”

And another thing… in 2002, Keith was nominated by his students and went on to be voted Classic FM’s Music Teacher of the Year – winning £10,000 worth of Yamaha musical equipment for the school as well as a computer system running Sibelius.