Skip to content

A NSW Government website

Welcome to the NSW Curriculum website

NSW Curriculum
NSW Education Standards Authority

11–12Music Life Skills 11–12 Syllabus (2025)

Implementation from 2027
Expand for detailed implementation advice

Content

Life Skills

Life Skills for Stage 6

Through collaborative curriculum planning, it may be decided that Life Skills outcomes and content are the most appropriate option for some students with intellectual disability.

Creative practice

Students perform, create, listen and respond to music to develop their creative practice as composers, performers and interpreters of music. They create and shape original material through improvisation, songwriting and composition, using voice, instruments and digital tools. Students explore how techniques, including performing and expression, are used to communicate musical ideas.

Music context and Elements of music should be integrated with this focus area as appropriate to the needs, abilities and prior learning of students.

Performing
  • Experiment with performing loud and soft sounds vocally or with instruments

  • Experiment with ways to soften or dampen the sound of a musical instrument

  • Make decisions about how to perform music to engage with an audience

  • Use silence to create an effect when vocalising or playing instruments

  • Use dynamics and expression to shape a performance

  • Respond to others’ use of expression when performing in a group

Listening and responding
  • Identify how dynamics and expression are used to communicate meaning

  • Explore how the Elements of music are used in a piece of music

  • Recognise changes in sounds created by instrument-specific techniques

  • Reflect on how the Elements of music are used to communicate meaning in music

Creating and composing
  • Improvise to create musical ideas

  • Use technology to combine and layer sounds

  • Use digital sounds to communicate ideas

  • Document performance techniques

  • Reflect on the use of expression in own composition

Safe and ethical practices
  • Demonstrate safe practices when listening and responding, creating and composing or performing music

  • Demonstrate hygiene protocols when sharing instruments and resources

  • Demonstrate respectful and cooperative behaviours when working with others

  • Demonstrate appropriate protocols when engaging with live or online music

  • Acknowledge composers, arrangers and/or collaborators when performing, creating or composing pieces of music

Related files