Well, it has been a really busy year with plenty of amazing Music delivery happening across a range of settings and in partnership with some fantastic organisations.
As we look ahead to 2023, here’s a recap of some of the wonderful things we have achieved in 2022 - our first full year of delivery under
our new name and new brand!
New National Plan for Music Education and Culture for Health Scoping Review
We welcomed the publication of the revised National Plan for Music early in the year. We are
passionate about breaking down barriers and promoting the life-changing power of music and commend the plan’s renewed emphasis on inclusion and opportunities for all.
We wrote this blog post on our thoughts. We have been delighted to support the work of the new ASONE Hub, sitting on both their strategic board and EDI sub-committee.
We were also really interested to read the Culture for Health Scoping Review, which sets out an encouraging road map for arts for health work in Europe.
Music and Drama Awards 2023!
In October, we were delighted to hear that we had been shortlisted for the 2023 Music and Drama Education Awards in the Progressive and Inclusive Music Education category sponsored by Rocksteady. It is so wonderful to receive this recognition, and we are excited about the February awards ceremony.
You can find out more and see who else has been shortlisted here.
Training
We love providing training and workshops, allowing us to share our practice with others. In March, Emily (our director) and Giles Woolley (one of our music practitioners) enjoyed delivering a guest lecture for students at Canterbury Christ Church University.
Emily has been invited to be on a national expert panel dedicated to moving the Sing Up Foundation forward. She also recorded a Podcast for BAST (Be a Singing Teacher), in which she discussed trauma-informed practice and has been invited to create learning resources for BAST members.
We were delighted to deliver two training sessions at different events for Cornwall’s ASONE Hub. The first saw young people from Pencalenick Special School deliver a Taiko Drumming workshop in partnership with one of our practitioners Jane Staffieri. The second focused on Trauma Informed Music practice and was delivered at the recent Hub Conference by Giles.
Music for Wellbeing and Young People
2022 has seen the delivery of 3 terms of our Music for Wellbeing project funded by Youth Music. We have had four Music for Wellbeing practitioners embedded for a day a week in four different settings: Restormel AP Academy, Sowenna (residential mental health unit), Pencalenick Special School, and Wheal Northey GP surgery.
Thank you to our excellent partners for their continued support of this project. This work is not always easy, but thanks to strong collaborations, we have been able to work with over 80 young people. The project will end in July 2023, but we hope to secure funding to continue delivering this very important work with young people.
The work delivered is really exciting, and we are seeing some great music being composed and performed and some fantastic personal outcomes for young people. Thanks to support from ASONE Music Hub, we will be able to expand the social prescribing work into a new GP surgery from Jan 2023, doubling the number of young people we can support through social prescribing.
You can read some of the case studies written about this project on this blog, and we look forward to publishing more of these in the new year.
The project funding has also supported us in recruiting a paid intern for 6 months in a Project Coordinator and Trainee Evaluator role. We were blown away by the level and quality of applications we received. Loveday Ayto joined us in November and is already making a considerable impact and teaching us lots of new skills.
Music Mentoring and Small Group Work Delivery
Thanks to support from ASONE Hub and the Virtual School team, we have been able to deliver a number of 10 week music mentoring programmes with individual young people.
We have also been delivering some fantastic small group work at Nine Maidens AP academy. This has included Guitar, Vocal, Keyboard, and Music Technology skills.
We delivered a wonderful inclusive music ensemble project in the summer term with over 20 young people making music and performing at a community event at Cotehele Quay in August. We were so pleased to witness friendships being formed amongst young people who have been isolated for so long due to lockdowns.
Singing for Health
The Singing For Health Network goes from strength to strength, with new members joining all the time (just £25 per year!) and a fantastic series of training events and networking opportunities.
Thanks to Baz Chapman and the rest of the S4H team for all their work on making the Network such a thriving community for both researchers and singing practitioners. Check out the podcast series too!
Focussing on our home county of Cornwall, our established Singing for Lung Health group Anella (based in St Austell) has continued to meet online every Friday, and we are looking forward to establishing a group in the Truro area next year. We joined BBC Cornwall to talk about this work back in May.
We were delighted to work with Cornwall MS Society in November to deliver a pilot Singing for Wellbeing session at the Revive Café in Camborne and look forward to building this new partnership in 2023.
We have been forging an exciting new partnership with the SingUp Foundation developing a new training course on Trauma and Mental Health-informed Singing Practice. There is still time to sign up (deadline 15th Jan 2023). This has been made possible thanks to funding from Youth Music.
Looking Ahead
We are delighted to be launching a new Youth Ambassadors programme for the ASONE hub in the new year. This builds on the Youth Voice work we completed for the Hub back in 2018-19.
Our Music for Wellbeing practitioners will continue to deliver amazing work with young people for the 2 year Youth Music project. As part of the dissemination of learning from this project, we have been busy recording a podcast series in 2022. We look forward to releasing the 6 episodes between January – July 2023.
Thanks to all the contributors so far and to Giles Wooley for the brilliant editing.
We will carry on delivering music mentoring in a number of schools across Cornwall, with new work starting in Caradon Alternative Provision Academy too.
Our new Trauma and Mental Health-informed Singing Course will launch in early Jan, and Emily, our Director, will be delivering a session on Trauma Informed Practice on 24th Feb at the Music and Drama Education Expo in London. We look forward to sharing our Social Prescribing work with young people at the re-scheduled Talk into Action Conference in Bristol in partnership with the ASONE Hub.
On 7th Feb, we are looking forward to attending the next Trovya (Cornish for discover) event led by Arts Well UK, taking place in St Austell.
Thanks again to all our partners and supporters.
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