Case Study Project: Sing Up
Sector: Education
Sing Up is the Music Manifesto’s National Singing Programme that has been set up to put singing at the heart of every primary school in England by 2011. The programme is produced by a consortium comprising, Youth Music with Abbott Mead Vickers, Faber Music and The Sage Gateshead.
A high profile media and schools campaign highlighting the benefits of singing and how good quality singing should be central to primary school children’s lives became the call for action to schools, parents and music providers to visit the site. Here they could find singing activities, engaging ways to build their confidence and expertise through singing and harness this to encourage and teach kids to sing utilising the resource of singing activities available.
What was needed:
- Site to allow information about singing and the positive results singing can achieve to be easily communicated to parents
- Way for parents and teachers to engage in teaching and singing related activities
- Creative tools to allow music and singing resources to be created, made easily and freely accessible to parents, teachers and music providers
- Way to reward schools and pupils for taking part in singing campaigns
- Way to engage users interactively by allowing user generated content creation
- Effective monitoring to ensure targets of the Sing Up programme were being met at all stages
What we did
Working closely with the consortium Phocuus designed and developed a site that that ensured clear signposts and easy access for parents, teachers and music providers to relevant singing information.
For parents, fun singing games and activities like singing to a song while on a car journey, or at a picnic were created by music experts, converted into downloadable PDF activity plans and published to the site using the Content Managed System (CMS).
For teachers a song resource area, the Song Bank was created that utilised our Digital Asset Management (DAM) system. This allowed copyrighted music to be uploaded by Faber Music and lesson plans to be dynamically generated as PDFs that could be used as supporting tools for curriculum subjects across Keystage 1 – 6 and downloaded by teachers for use in the classroom. Integration with a third party software, Scorch, allows users to view, listen to, transpose and print sheet music to accompany the classroom activities. The flexible user rights also allowed access for music service leaders to also access and use the resource within music workshops.
For music providers the creation of the Workforce Development Programme has culminated in direct access to training information, advice, tips and sponsored music training workshops and events being published directly to the site by The Sage Gateshead.
We also developed a unified login webservice for integration with a school’s database of contacts to enable single sign on and access to different musical database applications including the national school’s awards programme.
The outcome
- Phase and one and two of the campaign has engaged over 16,500 schools and music organisations in England which is nearly 70% of the primary-age schools target that the Sing Up programme has been set up to reach
- To date 22,000 participants who are the music teachers in workshops, communities and youth centres, have registered through the site and been trained by the Workforce Development
- Over 300 songs and lesson plans have been uploaded to the Song Bank which are accessible to over 16,500 unique schools and music organisations that have registered to the site since 2007