Rebecca Ledgard and her team are preparing their lesson materials. Their objective is to teach 15 songs – from scratch – to a group of seven-year-olds. No big deal, except Ledgard's classroom is Birmingham Symphony Hall, and the class itself will comprise over 2,000 students. The project, SingMaker, is one of several key vocal initiatives run by Ex Cathedra.
Ledgard joined the organisation as an education co-ordinator back in 2000, working alongside Skidmore to grow offerings to schools. She is now director of education and there are 23 people working on Ex Cathedra's outreach projects. SingMaker has been delivered in impressively varied contexts; from London's Wigmore Hall to Shrewsbury International School in Bangkok. ‘We started with a vocal skills programme where we went into schools and then put on a concert,’ says Ledgard, ‘then in 2004 we developed Singing Playgrounds, which really took off.’
Singing Playgrounds combines training for teachers with leadership lessons for children, as well as providing the supporting resources and activities required for that process. Ledgard, together with Ula Weber, Singing Playgrounds project leader, has delivered the work in nearly 1,000 primary schools across the UK and in several countries across the world.
Ledgard explains the process: ‘We work with the music hubs, such as Warwickshire, who put us in touch with a cluster of schools, to whom we offer teaching training in the singing games. Then we spend some time in schools teaching the leadership activities and adapt games so that they are accessible for all children in that particular group. After several weeks or months, we gather everyone together and create a concert programme over the course of an afternoon, which we perform that evening. We turn the concert hall into a playground and the children perform their singing games alongside some traditional performances on stage – and the audience is invited to participate, too.’
Inspired by the success of Singing Playgrounds, Sally Spencer, a nurse and singer in Ex Cathedra, realised the singing workshops could also benefit children outside the classroom. ‘Singing is so good for wellbeing,’ says Ledgard, ‘it releases oxytocin, the “feel-good” hormone, reduces cortisol, the ‘stress’ hormone, and helps regulate breathing.’ Ledgard and Spencer set about adapting Singing Playgrounds to bring sessions to children in hospitals. Singing Medicine sees a group of eight work in pairs to share some of the Singing Playgrounds music at bedsides. ‘In hospitals, children don't have many opportunities for decision-making, so this work offers them a chance to be in control for a while, and escape into their imagination,’ says Ledgard.
The work started at Birmingham Children's Hospital in 2004, and has since been shared with Great Ormond Street, John Radcliffe, Warwick and Heartlands hospitals, as well as travelling to Auckland and Singapore. ‘Birmingham is our home and Birmingham Children's Hospital is our flagship venue,’ explains Ledgard, ‘but we go wherever we're asked!’ Singing medicine has won an NHS Health and Social Care Award, and most recently an award from the Royal Society for Public Health for outstanding contribution to the field of arts and health.
‘We work within all the inpatient wards you might expect. We're also trained to go to rooms where children are in isolation. These are often children who have been in hospital for a very long time,’ says Ledgard. ‘We notice that sometimes singing-play can reduce the response to pain, or to help a parent and baby play together, or distract a child from a procedure. It's responsive – we are sometimes asked to increase or decrease a patient's heart-rate – we try to be very aware of the clinical needs.’
There has been a flurry of research into how music, particularly singing, can impact positively on health and recovery. Birmingham City University carried out a research project last year that followed Ex Cathedra and demonstrated clear benefits of the singing intervention. It enabled Ledgard and her team to create an adult version of the project which is now being shared with stroke patients. Of course, all of this incredible work requires resources – it's often the case that a project receives support for a year or two, until attention is redirected elsewhere. ‘We constantly push to make it better and demonstrate to our funders that we are committed to it,’ says Ledgard. ‘Most of the funding comes from donations and trusts. We are a national portfolio organisation under the Arts Council and we receive some funding from Birmingham City Council but both have been cut – it is a huge challenge.
‘In the last few years we have noticed that schools have got less time to give to music activities. We've had to reduce workshop times for Singing Playgrounds, for example, as the time has to be safe-guarded for numeracy and literacy,’ Ledgard observes. ‘We know that singing engages the brain in many ways – we believe it should be at the heart of primary education.’
