Education Resources

Edward Watkins, Director of Gabrieli Roar partner choir Inner Voices, writes for us about the Music Scholar Admission Tests at the West London Free School.

At the West London Free School, where I have been Director of Music since the school opened in 2011, the school is fortunate enough to be able to select 10% of its cohort on the basis on musical aptitude. Our Music Scholars go on to receive free instrumental tuition on one instrument, theory classes, sight-singing lessons and take part in our choirs, bands and instrumental ensembles. The Music Scholars are the foundation upon which we have built a successful department with half the school learning an instrument and a third taking GCSE (over 4 times the national average).

When deciding how to create our tests we grappled with the familiar problem of how to write a test that is not socially exclusive. Students benefitting from instrumental lessons is strongly associated with social class and we wanted to avoid a situation where only those students who have already had hours of private one to one lessons could be successful in our tests.

While there are tests such as the Bentley test available we decided to go for a one to one test with a teacher who could get a better idea of how well the students perform on such skills as singing in thirds. Our assessment consists of two parallel sets of tests, one of pitch and the other a mixture of rhythm and pulse tests. There are some well known parts, like identifying the top, middle and bottom notes of chords, alongside some of our own that we think work well. One is singing a small section of a pop song that has a pause in the singing followed, a bar and a bit later, by a tricky syncopated entry. This has been useful in finding the students with the broadest range of musical skills.

We have recently completed our fifth year of Music Scholarship assessments and the picture so far is one in which we have been broadly successful in finding some excellent young musicians while also gaining a cohort of Music Scholars who are from a range of backgrounds. In our current year 7 there 33% of the Music Scholars are eligible for free school meals, similar to the borough average. There will, of course, be some great young musicians who we miss; no test is perfect but we feel the process so far has been one which fulfils our founding mission to provide a first quality music education to a comprehensive cohort of Hammersmith’s young people.