Guidance materials to support teachers in assessing pupils’ progress in musical learning within the National Curriculum have been published by the National Association of Music Education. The materials include an assessment framework that describes essential standards in students’ understanding of their music, their practical work and their ability to evaluate and improve their work. The current National Curriculum will remain in place until 2014, and the new guidelines can help teachers to understand the progress that their students are making, more accurately assess the musical strengths and weaknesses of individual students and whole classes, to enable them to adapt their teaching to improve students’ learning.
www.name.org.uk/projects/app/assessing-pupils-progress-app
The largest public artwork in Ireland is almost complete, following six years of planning and months of construction work. Designed by London based artists Vong Phaophanit, a former Turner Prize Nominee (1993), and Claire Oboussier, the £800,000 ‘Mute Meadow’ artwork marks the regeneration of Derry~Londonderry as it gets set to become the City of Culture in 2013.
Contemporary artists are at the heart of a new scheme to show that museums are “engines for creativity” in the South West of England. The New Expressions initiative will see museums in Cheltenham, Falmouth, Bristol, Barnstaple, Plymouth and Exeter working with artists and audiences to invigorate museum collections, buildings and spaces. Part of a programme being launched by Renaissance South West, the government’s investment programme for regional museums, New Expressions sets out to provide stretching opportunities for artists working at the forefront of contemporary practice, and to raise the standing of South West England as a leading destination for contemporary art, reaching over half a million museum visitors in 2011/12.
Garsington Opera has moved to the estate of Wormsley in Buckinghamshire, a home of the Getty family, and will open its summer season with Mozart’s ‘The Magic Flute’ on 2 June in a 600-seat Japanese-style pavilion. Designed by architect Robin Snell, it features covered verandas and terraces with bars from which patrons can enjoy views of the surrounding countryside. Garsington previously played to audiences at Garsington Manor in Oxfordshire for over 20 years.
In the first 12 hours of booking, 85,921 tickets were sold for this year’s BBC Proms. This is a 7.4% increase on last year, when 80,000 tickets were allocated during the first day (which included one extra hour of booking). More than 39,000 individual orders were processed, compared with 36,406 in 2010. All seated tickets for Gustavo Dudamel and the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra sold out within three hours, but up to 1,400 £5 ‘Promming’ tickets will be released on the day of each concert.