Reporting by Nigel Hunter
The panel for the Music and a Child's Development session comprised Naomi Eisendstadt, a child carer throughout her professional life in the academic and voluntary sectors, followed by involvement with Sure Start and now head of the Cabinet Office's Taskforce on Social Exclusion; Howard Goodall, theatre, TV theme and choral composer and author and presenter of TV documentaries on music, and Professor Lord Robert Winston, Professor of Fertility Studies at the Imperial College School of Medicine, London University, head of the Department of Reproductive Medicine at Hammersmith Hospital and BBC TV presenter on medical and scientific subjects.
Among points made by Eisendstadt was the big impact that singing has on learning for children, which should start at an early age. "Singing to your baby helps the relationship between mother and child," she said. She believes that the enthusiasm music teachers and those coaching other subjects have for their projects can sometimes be a problem as well as being a "key factor" in their success. "They must remember to engage with children who aren't good at their subject and not leave them behind." Eisendstadt recalled that none of her family were musical but her father had "great cultural interests" including music which she grew up with and from which she benefited. "Singing is marvellous and virtually everybody does it if only in the bath. We need to provide much more opportunity for children who want to sing or play an instrument."
Goodall observed that children can sing quite naturally from an early age and what is really important is to audit how best to instruct them. Pupils sing throughout the day in some schools he has visited, not just during the music lesson. Returning to the natural ability of youngsters, he mentioned another school in Wythenshawe, Manchester, where the music class was being taken by a different teacher one day who cleared his throat to produce a tuning note for the benefit of the waiting children. However, when he counted them in, they hit the first note perfectly without the necessity of the teacher's throat or any musical accompaniment.
"Someone I know teaches refugee children," said Goodall, "and one of the class was an Iraqi boy traumatised by his experiences who remained mute and never communicated with anyone in school or out of it. But one day during a music class it was suddenly noticed he was singing along with the other children and his silent days were over."
Professor Lord Robert Winston followed up Eisendstadt's point about early engagement with children by recalling experiments conducted with sounds such as music communicated to children in the womb to see if they recognised or remembered them later. "I'm not entirely convinced that they did," he observed. He sang at school but was fairly indifferent to music as a child until a defining moment one day at a dress rehearsal for a Christmas oratorio when the school orchestra struck up behind him. "An orchestra is the most exciting form of collaboration," he asserted.