As Sing Up celebrates its first anniversary, we caught up with some of the people who have benefited from the Music Manifesto's national singing programme. Anna Lane teaches Years 5 and 6 at Kelsey Primary School in Lincolnshire. She tells us how Sing Up has changed life in the classroom.
Before Sing Up, singing at Kelsey Primary was a cursory activity, taking place occasionally in assemblies and Christmas shows. The school would never have called itself a 'singing school' and teachers found it hard to engage the older children, especially the boys.
One of the reasons singing wasn't strong at the school was because the teachers didn't have the confidence to lead it. "I'm not a music specialist and definitely not a singer," says teacher Anna Lane, who despite having musical interests (guitar and clarinet) hadn't sung since school and certainly felt too self-conscious to sing in the classroom.
That all changed when soundLINCS, the Sing Up Area Leader for Lincolnshire, sent along animateur Tracy Mason Powers to work with the school. Tracy worked with groups of Key Stage 2 pupils and before long Key Stage 1 children were demanding their own Sing Up sessions.
Importantly, it's not just the pupils who have benefited from Tracy's expertise. She also worked with teachers at the school to give them the right skills and support to help the school keep singing in the long term.
"I asked Tracy if she would mentor me in setting up a school choir," says Anna. "It was always something that I wanted to do but I wasn't sure how to start. To get the support is great. She helped me choose pieces of music, songs that children can relate to, to find out where the resources were and work out how to structure the sessions - a warm up at the beginning and calming down session at the end. We've got about 15 children in KS2 now, from a year group of 60.
"We've got teaching assistants singing with us and feeling more confident about it. The headteacher's even keen to join in." And so are the pupils. "There's definitely a different atmosphere in music activities," says Anna. "The boys are joining and they're not self-conscious. Their behaviour has improved, they're not going to disrupt the lessons because they're actually going to have fun, they're laughing, they're enjoying it."
Anna has been using singing in non-music lessons, like French and maths. "In French it's a nice way to start a lesson and get them all engaged. Their confidence has been boosted. And when children learn songs they remember the lyrics, so to have maths taught in a song improves their memories."
The school's headteacher, Mark Burton has been really impressed with the results: "Sing Up was the spark that our school had been waiting for to set it alight. It has provided us with the springboard to launch music into the curriculum and inject our school with song."
And for Anna personally, it has been a great experience as well. "I always felt very self-conscious about singing," she says, "but I managed to do a singing assembly in front of the whole school last week. It was quite impressive!"