I am looking at a job advert for five new full-time choral directors, pension included, in the Birmingham area. ‘So what?’, you might ask. But you might also reasonably ask: ‘Five? Full time? With a pension?’. In a year where the BBC is thinking twice about continuing to fund the BBC Singers, the UK’s only professional full-time vocal ensemble, you might be forgiven for wondering how there are five brand-new, permanent choral director posts being advertised anywhere in the UK. The answer starts (like all the best things, as natives like me will tell you) in West Yorkshire.
Going national
The Diocese of Leeds Schools Singing Programme was founded in 2003 and has grown steadily to include 71 Catholic state schools stretching from Ripon to Wakefield. The programme reaches just under 6,500 children weekly across the diocese and includes more than 150 vocal groups. Half of the schools in the programme have catchments that include areas considered to be in the lowest 1% in terms of deprivation nationally. It has been covered in The Times, on Songs of Praise, and its choirs regularly broadcast on national radio. It is no longer the ‘promising enterprise’ it used to be. Rather, it is now established as one of the definitive models of what can be achieved with seed funding; with the boldness to head into the classroom and engage with schools; and with the force of will to widen access.
So effective is the model that in 2021 the Schools Singing Programme began a national initiative to roll out a similar operation in every Catholic diocese in the UK. The success of the ‘Leeds model’ provided the necessary evidence to secure an extraordinary £4.9m grant from the Hamish Ogston Foundation, and the National Schools Singing Programme (NSSP) was born. Similar programmes are already underway across the UK in Catholic dioceses from Aberdeen to Southwark. The Archdiocese of Birmingham is in the early stages, which is, you guessed it, why they are currently advertising for ‘five enthusiastic choral directors’.
It is not only Catholic foundations that are benefiting. Six Anglican cathedrals – Sheffield, Derby, Leicester, Liverpool, Newcastle and York Minster – have also received funding, bringing the estimated reach, according to the Hamish Ogston Foundation, to 20,000 children at more than 200 schools nationally.
Sustained whole-class singing
What is the model, and why is it so successful? It all starts in the classroom, says Thomas Leech, the director of the Schools Singing Programme in Leeds.
‘In primary schools in the Leeds diocese we see just under six and a half thousand children each week with our team of choral directors’, says Leech. ‘The model is whole-class primary school singing; not, on the whole, selective choirs in schools. When you do that of course, some kids who might be amazing opt not to do it because of their preconception of what music might be. Normally, we will work with the classes in school for a couple of years – they get two years of really high-quality singing, and some of these school groups sound absolutely amazing.’
‘The idea is that if your starting point is sustained whole-class singing, you unlock potential that would never have been noticed if the child or the family had had to put themselves forward. We might be in a school for an hour or two hours a week, and we are trying very hard to make sure that this then flows into the wider school curriculum. We share a lot of information; we have a very good curriculum framework and we work with the music leads [on the school staff]. So, it’s not just a music expert bobbing in for half an hour and disappearing.’
A low bar for entry and a high engagement rate
‘We are in more than 70 schools across the [Leeds] diocese,’ continues Leech, ‘and every little area has its own pyramid of choirs. For example, in Bradford, where we work very closely with the Blessed Christopher Wharton Catholic Academy Trust, their schools buy into the programme and our choral directors are taking whole-class singing sessions. Those children who are particularly excited by it, or who are showing promise or aptitude, or sheer joy at singing, get offered places in our suite of after-school Bradford Choirs. There is a Junior Choir, and then senior boys’ and girls’ choirs on top of that.’
Similar after-school opportunities are found across the diocese, resulting in a rich network of youth choirs and the opportunity for progression into senior groups.
‘We want to get as many kids in the after-school choirs as possible,’ says Leech. ‘The excellence of it comes from engagement and enjoyment, and the engagement comes from the numbers. The bar for entry to our after-school choirs is very low – can they pitch match? I firmly believe that they can all sing and it’s our job to realise that opportunity.’
Appropriate music at the right time and place
From such firm foundations spring various new opportunities, and the Bradford Catholic Youth Choir was the first Northern choir to be invited to take part in the Gabrieli Consort’s youth choir training programme ‘Gabrieli Roar’, with senior members of the choir taking part in the professional orchestra’s English Coronation recording and performance.
Considering the success of the whole enterprise, and the realistically high hopes of a big impact nationally, it might be worth considering what the actual aim of the whole thing is. The Bishop of Leeds, Marcus Stock, is quoted on the NSSP website as saying that it is ‘one of the most effective forms of evangelisation I have seen and experienced’. But considering the inclusion of Anglican cathedrals, and the huge injection of cash from a secular funding body, the Hamish Ogston Foundation, the question might be raised as to whether the goal has shifted from Catholic doctrine to evangelism of a purely musical kind. In terms of the music that is taught, Leech says, ‘Our mix is about 50-50 sacred to secular when we’re working in the Catholic schools. And I know some of the new Church of England singing programmes are going to work in secular schools as well, so there’s a different issue in terms addressing the balance there.
‘My view is that we are not trying to take obscure cathedral music into a Year 3 class; it has got to be music that is educationally and musically appropriate for the vocal and developmental stage that the children are at. We have a big range of in-house resources and lots of them will be familiar to other youth choirs. We follow a curriculum framework that is experiential – sound before symbol – and Lucinda Geoghegan from the National Youth Choir of Scotland has developed a musicianship and musical literacy course for us, which is amazing. The other day I saw a colleague do some Year 6 whole-class singing in a primary school in Leeds, and all these children were sight-singing stave notation – pentatonic melodies – completely accurately, having followed this scheme. It was absolutely amazing, because when you set the bar at that level, they can do it.’
Diocese of Leeds Music
Bradford Catholic Youth Choir in a performance of Bach’s St Matthew Passion
Twenty years and counting
‘Almost all of the UK Catholic dioceses have signed up to the National Schools Singing Programme,’ Leech continues. ‘Some of them are rolling it out quite quickly now. It is an amazing connection between trying to enhance music within schools and then supporting it.
‘In Leeds we have been doing it now for 20 years, and we have had the opportunity to make hundreds of mistakes along the way and learn from those. I hope that that the Leeds part of the national programme will become less of an exception; and that we will see this level of opportunity in church music more widely. Children from schools in deprived areas have got just as much potential as anyone else. It is just that the access to opportunity is so much harder.’
I spoke to Leech during Holy week, a busy time for his choirs, and he took the opportunity to make a closing reflection on his future hopes for the programme: ‘My real aspiration is to see the National Schools Singing Programme massively increase the pipeline of participation and realise all the rewards that participating in really good music brings. And what I would really love to see is that maybe in ten years’ time it will be one of the kids singing in our Good Friday or Easter Saturday music – it might actually be one of them directing these choirs and running these programmes.’
