Helen Toole, St Mary and All Saints Primary School, Reading

Helen Toole

St Mary and All Saints Primary School, Reading

Originally a qualified lawyer, redundancy from legal practice gave Helen the opportunity to become involved initially as a volunteer in her children’s primary school, where she set about establishing a musical culture within the school, drawing on her own musical background as well as undertaking numerous training courses and finding opportunities to observe a variety of music teachers and pedagogies.

Having qualified, Helen became a full-time primary classroom teacher before moving to teach primary music exclusively. Now with more than 20 years’ classroom experience, she teaches curriculum music across the primary spectrum.

Helen has forged a strong relationship with Berkshire Music Trust, for whom she has also worked part time for the past four years, and spent three years as a sessional lecturer on Music as a Foundation Subject for the BA(Ed), PGCE and Schools Direct programmes at the University of Reading. As part of her role at BMT, Helen has delivered CPD sessions for local school teachers as well as for BMT teachers.

Helen believes that all primary teachers should feel empowered to teach music and that they do not need to be “specialists” to do so. She particularly enjoys providing training to de-mystify notation for classroom teachers. Helen has devised (and continues to develop) her own scheme of work for SMAS and would be happy to support other schools in doing the same thing. She is a great advocate for use of classroom instruments that go beyond untuned percussion (recorders, glockenspiels, ukuleles) and would be happy to support other teachers in introducing them to their settings. She is also happy to look at how a school implements a commercial scheme of work and provide support that might be required with that that.