Clap, Clap, Bang My Tum: What Different Amounts of Money Buy
Clap, clap (on left) clap, clap (right)
Stamp stamp
Bang my tum like a drum
Wiggle my bum.
It isn’t exactly high opera and I’m not sure if Wagner or Verdi would have approved, though I think Mozart would have been delighted! This song, and dance, was the introduction to opera being done by the Academy of Barmy Composers in Chipping Norton Theatre in June. Seventy children from two local primary schools had a day learning about what opera is, who composed it, and what fun it can be – engaged, involved, participating. They then presented their ‘work’ in costume to another hundred children, parents and friends. One mum arriving for the concert said, ‘I don’t like opera. Hi-falutin rubbish. Don’t know what I’m doing ‘ere.’ When she left, her comment was: ‘That was fun, they got a lot out of that.‘
We have three opera companies working with Cotswolds Arts Through Schools — Longborough Festival Opera, Oxford Opera and the Academy of Barmy Composers. Between them, over the last year, more than 5,000 children have had a chance to sing, move, and see a story portrayed in music, performing in short-form operas (Hansel and Gretel, Pirates of Penzance, Dr Dulcamara) or on stages at Longborough, Chipping Norton Theatre, the Sheldonian, Churchill Church, St Mary’s Church (Banbury), Chipping Norton Town Hall, the Cotswold Hotel and Kingham Lodge Pavilion. St John’s, Banbury, wrote to us after one such session: ‘Everyone at St John’s RC School would like to convey enormous thanks for such a stimulating and inspiring experience. The children have been buzzing about this experience and we will continue to build on it by listening to some more beautiful arias! THANK YOU so so much for all your energy, expertise and time.‘ It isn’t simply the process of learning the words and music (requiring more concentration and work than a TikTok video), but learning how to follow a tune, to project, and to be part of a group. Most of all, performing is invaluable in building confidence. Every opera workshop costs over £1000 to deliver; you can see why schools can’t afford it on £1 a year per pupil for all arts!
What we have found is that whereas general teachers, with support from Kapow or AccessArt, can teach art week by week, they are much more nervous about teaching music. If they are not already musicians themselves, they don’t know where to start. There is marvellous syllabus support available from Sing Up, Charanga, Aurora and others, and we can help at relatively modest costs, but if you can’t play an instrument yourself and don’t sing (note I say don’t, not can’t, because I think everybody can, with help) then you lack the confidence to teach a class. Given that student teachers only get four hours’ teaching on how to teach music across a two-year degree course, it isn’t surprising that new young teachers don’t know where to start, and as older teachers retire, music in schools dies. What we try to do is put a trained professional into a school for a few hours or a day each week, to start creating a musical culture there. The difference is transformational: class teachers join in, whole-school singing follows, and often that leads to learning instruments ( once started even non-musical class teachers can lead a class in learning ocarinas), which leads to musical notation and, after a year or two, composing tunes. We now have schools with bands as well as choirs, with instruments we have provided. It is expensive to do this — about £12,000 a school per year — but the difference it makes is phenomenal. We have to raise a specific grant for each of these dedicated teachers.
That input from committed teachers sits on top of the opera workshops, singing events, and gifts of instruments where a school can find an existing staff member, parent, or professional from the County Music Hub who will come and help teach. We are now helping start two choirs for pupils from more than one school who want to sing outside school hours. None of it is enough — but it is all a start, and it is changing lives.
The variety runs from that £12,000 embedded music post right down to something far cheaper and simpler: a single day of professional-led art workshops. It costs a fraction of the price (perhaps £500 a term plus some one-offs of a few hundred a year), and the response from schools is consistently, almost startlingly enthusiastic. At Burford Primary, children explored charcoal for the first time. ‘This is great — I’ve found my medium!’ said one Year 6 pupil. The school reported that every child could access the workshop, and that the technique carried through into pupils’ own work across the school afterwards. At Hanwell Fields, an artist called Ross Heywood ran a comic-drawing workshop; the school reported it particularly engaged boys who don’t often enjoy art lessons, with children asking to carry on drawing into the afternoon. And at Kirtlington, children from Nursery to Year 6 spent a day painting stones, now coated in waterproof sealant and placed in the school’s sensory garden. Staff singled out how inclusive the session was for pupils with SEND — and, as one teacher put it, ‘both teachers and pupils said how much they liked the pens.’
On another occasion I’ll write about the full variety of art experiences we offer — over 26 different ones — alongside the art teacher training, syllabus support and installations. But here I will mention one project with Oxford Brookes University and Art in Schools. Last term, twenty schools recieved software from Art in Schools that they can show on their TV screens (sometimes we provide a laptop too, to enable this). The software was developed for secondary schools, and we are pioneering its use in primary schools, with Brookes carrying out an assessment. Each week the screens show a different subject. During the World Cup, they showed Lowry’s picture of people going to the match, graffiti of a player kicking a ball, murals of the Lionesses, and modern art based on balls. Who knew art could be about football? In other weeks the screens focus on paintings — Tiger in a Tropical Storm (Surprised!) by Rousseau, Horse Frightened by a Lion by Stubbs, Balloon Dog by Koons — with facts and questions displayed alongside. Children see the pictures as they wander round or have lunch, chat about them in the queue, and are asked: how is it made, what emotions are shown, how does it make you feel? The whole exercise is designed to make children aware that art is more than wall decoration — that it is a means of expression, that they can react to it, that it is interesting to talk about. Why aren’t we doing this in all seventy schools? Because some schools don’t have TVs, and we can’t afford to provide TVs as well as the software and laptops. A work in progress – only £500 per school but that’s £35,000 for all our current schools!
Next term we are starting to add textiles, TV & film and photography to the options available to schools. But here I will add a word about the African dancing we introduced in the spring term. We had been doing ballet for a while, but for lots of children it was too static, and the delivery method was a TV screen. African dancing was a whole different dimension — a brilliant drummer (who happened to have a degree in pedagogy) and a Ghanaian lady who knew how to move, and did so with vigour, showing Ghanaian and Nigerian dances. Initially the children were a bit bemused, but they put on strips of African cloth, and some had a go at dancing, some tried drumming. Within four weeks, everybody was dancing and drumming. In the fifth week, the dancing group was asked to create their own routine and have the whole group copy it. All hilarious fun.
What we had not realised beforehand was that the SEN children, who at the start had held back from joining in, were now totally into it — and when the whole group copied their routine and did what they were telling them to do, it altered the group dynamic. For the first time at school (maybe in their lives), they were leaders. The boost it gave to self-confidence and enthusiasm cannot be overstated, and it rubbed off in class all week. That course lasted a term but 11 children have gone on with private drumming lessons we subsidise – come and hear them at an event this autumn! Now we just need more expert drummers and dancers £3000 a term per school. (And similar costs if we add English Country Dancing as an option, which we are trying to do.)
From a single artist for a single day once a term, to a dedicated professional embedded in a school for a year, the amounts of money involved vary hugely — but at every level, something genuinely changes for the children involved. None of it happens without the funders, small and large, who make each of these different things possible.
