School of rock: meet the teachers hitting high notes in the classroom

“Many people have this strange power of being able to remember lyrics forever and to recall them,” says Birmingham-based maths and science teacher Eleftherios Loucas Trattos. The 23-year-old began listening to socially conscious hip-hop as a teen, and has been putting out his own music, under the moniker Left, ever since.

Keen to bring his passions for teaching and rapping together, Trattos studied how rhythm and rhyme play a role in memory, and he now uses this to help students at Stockland Green school, in Birmingham, engage with new and complex theories. In practice, this plays out in a myriad of ways – from Trattos performing raps he’s written about the solar system, to tasking his students with creating their own songs about particles in atoms.

Unsurprisingly, his music is now a staple in the classroom. “A lot of the kids like rap and can relate to it,” Trattos says. “I noticed they would talk a lot about rap in class, so it’s a cultural link we have and it builds mutual respect. It acts like an icebreaker and allows me to create a rapport with the kids.” And when he’s not using it as a teaching tool, he’s found rapping works as a great incentive too. “In most of my lessons the kids will ask me to do a rap, so I’ll say: ‘If you can complete this much work, at the end of the lesson I’ll do one.’”

Secondary school English teacher Yvonne Eba is another teacher using her lyrical skills to elevate lessons; something her students were initially more than a little dubious about. In fact, when she first told her class she was going to play them a rap she’d written about the play An Inspector Calls, they laughed. “They said: ‘You’re a teacher, you can’t rap,’” she recalls. What her students didn’t know is that the 30-year-old has been rapping since the age of 12, and when she’s not in the classroom, she can often be found at open mic nights around east London.

When she played her track, the class exploded. “The students said: ‘This is catchy, I understand [the play] now,’” Eba says. “Then they asked why I haven’t put it on TikTok.”

Eba’s An Inspector Calls track was far from a one-off, she often uses rap to help pupils engage with poetry. When teaching William Blake’s poem London, she played her class a rap song about the capital, then asked them to write their own stanza about it before they looked at the poem. “That warmed them up,” she says, adding: “I enjoy being able to be myself at work and sharing my passion with my students, but mainly I enjoy seeing them develop and progress.”

As any teacher will tell you, it’s not been easy to keep students’ energy up during the pandemic. Rachel Jeffery, who teaches at Spilsby primary academy, in Lincolnshire, kept her class engaged with online sing-alongs. “Throughout the first lockdown I did a weekly singing assembly online,” she says. “I’d choose a song – like The Circle of Life – and record a video of me singing it, usually in my kitchen. And then the children all posted videos of them joining in.

“It was amazing to see how many children engaged with it, being excited, enthusiastic and creative. It was really heartwarming to see and great to feel that I’d been able to bring them together in this way at a time when we couldn’t be together in school.”

Emily Owen, a teacher at Woodcroft primary school in London, also knows the power of a good tune. “We teach so much through song and rhyme,” she says. “For example, we sing the days of the week, as well as the seasons and the months of the year.” The 29-year-old also facilitates “music appreciation” sessions – where she’ll play the children a new genre of music, such as reggae or ska, and ask them to discuss their favourite tracks. She also asks her pupils, aged five to seven, to make up limericks. “We’ll do a rap about the Tudors or a song about the continents and the seas,” she says. “It’s particularly effective with children who have barriers to their learning.

“I love that I can give this back to my kids. [As a teacher], whatever you’re good at or interested in, you can apply it across the curriculum. You have that creativity.”

Before becoming a teacher, Ben McGinnes – who teaches at Danesfield school in Marlow, Buckinghamshire – was in a band, playing at weddings and holiday resorts. Now in his fourth year teaching, he runs a school rock band with students aged 10-11. “We learn things like musicianship and stage presence, how to be confident, microphone techniques, and the importance of listening to others,” McGinnes says. “[The children] also learn how to recover when something goes wrong.”

The band performs at the school’s summer festival, Danesfest, and last year he took the musicians to a recording studio, where they laid down their version of Hall and Oates’ You Make My Dreams. “It was one boy’s birthday and he said it was the best he’d ever had,” McGinnes says.

Like McGinnes, Olu Sodeinde also has a professional background in music, having worked with the likes of Ellie Goulding, Leona Lewis and Will Young, as well as having a singing part in Netflix’s Sex Education.

Keen to share his knowledge with the next generation, Sodeinde trained as a teacher, and is now head of music at Little Ilford school in Newham, east London, where he was tasked with setting the music department up from scratch. This allowed him to pour his industry experience into the curriculum and put his own stamp on it.

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“We teach what podcasting is all about and how to mix and work with DJ decks,” he says. “We have teachers at the school who were film composers and musicians before becoming teachers, so we’ve set up a project called Career School, where students learn about new ways of earning money, [including things such as] using YouTube, online promotion, and becoming your own manager. The digital age is what we’re preparing them for.”

The school also has regular concerts, recitals, singing contests, competitions and musicals, and has a band in every year group. “We’ve got [students] doing all sorts of stuff, from classical musicians, to pop and gospel,” Sodeinde says. “There’s a big range.”

But it’s not just the students who benefit from these creative ways of learning; for the teachers, sharing their passions with a new generation makes their time in the classroom even more fulfilling. “What I absolutely love is the magic of being able to pass my passion on. There’s nothing quite like it,” Sodeinde says.

In teaching every day is different, and so is every teacher. Discover 100 teachers across the country, shaping lives. And if you’d like to know how you can bring your individual passions to a job in teaching, head to Get Into Teaching to find out more.