Our composition project with children and young people with SEN

Since April 2022, Armonico Consort’s amazing workshop leaders have been working with children and young people from the eight SEN schools in the City of Coventry to create their very own show. Thanks to the support of Youth Music, around 80 children with a range of educational needs will be able to take part in a performance of their own unique version of the classic fable “Jack and the Beanstalk”. Throughout the process, the children have been supported to write their own songs and to tell this familiar story in their own way, and they will perform this work for the first time in the Albany Theatre, Coventry on 11th July. Each school will contribute a scene to the performance, with all the participants coming together to welcome the audience to the show and to say farewell in song at the end.

Armonico has been running projects in SEN schools for over 10 years now, but this is the largest project of this type we have ever attempted, delivered over a longer time-span, and we are learning a lot along the way. For example, these projects have taught us that different SEN settings have very different learning styles – some are more formal and others more relaxed, and we have worked on tailoring our delivery to those different styles. We also learned much more about how to include children and young people with who needed more support and supervision to play a full part, working with staff and TAs to learn how best to engage and to play to young people’s strengths. It has also underlined how important it is to make sure that the presentation technology works! We have also been working with some specialist "critical friends" within the SEN arts community in the West Midlands, and their comments along the way have been really helpful in developing our approach.

There have been some amazing highs along the way, with students teaching the songs they had created to each other, leading warm-ups and using improvisation to create the scenes between the songs, and even children who had been very quiet at the start of the sessions have become more and more engaged through the course of the project.

All those involved will be able to earn their Arts Award: Discover level accreditation, and staff are also benefiting from personal development along the way, sharpening their own skills in leading and supporting music and drama activities with the help of our specialist leaders, William and Patrick.

We are looking forward to seeing the results of the young people’s hard work on 11th July, and also to learning from the evaluation of the activity so we can plan for more work with other children in SEN schools in the future – the evaluation with the young people themselves will be particularly revealing! It will also contribute to a rewriting of Armonico’s own policies and procedures for working with young people with specific needs.

We can’t wait to share news of the performance and evaluation with the Network - we'll be posting more about it soon!

If you would like to know more about what we did and how we did it, please contact our Head of Education, Gaynor Larkin: glarkin@armonico.org.uk