Personal Reflections of Music in a PRU by Sarah Wilson
MAC Makes Music music leader, Sarah Wilson, talks about her experiences of working with children and young people with Social, Emotional and Mental Health difficulties. MAC Makes Music has a team of skilled Music Leaders with a variety of expertise in working with children in challenging circumstances. Sarah’s current work with MAC Makes Music is primarily with the PRU (Pupil Referral Unit) team. Sarah delivered this speech as part of a Key Note Address by Community Music pioneer, Phil Mullen, and a fellow colleague from the PRU team at ‘Sounding Out Inclusion’ a MAC Makes Music event for Music Leaders and Teachers.
This is not about me but I’m going to start by saying something about me. I did not want to be here today. The reason I did not want to be here is because I am similar to the young people that we are discussing.
I grew up as part of the only black family in our town, in Essex. With parents who were under their own very real pressures, who should have got divorced much earlier than they did against a constant backdrop of shouting. School was lonely for the first 8 years and violently racist for the last 5. I hardly ever fought back but I was blamed for the violence because I was always in the fight. I did not tell my parents because they were angry enough already.
I did not want to be here today because there are a million voices in the back of my head telling me how ‘awful’ I am. There are always a million voices in my head telling me how ‘awful’ I am.
The reason I tell you this is because the first thing we must try to understand about the young people in front of us is that their behaviour is a result of their circumstance. It is hardly ever personal, it is unlikely to be about who is in front of them and it is very unlikely to change in the face of someone else telling them how ‘awful’ they are.
Creativity provides space to explore, vent, escape and have successes. A time for lightness and laughter, a place to be seen and heard and may be understood in the tiniest of ways. If we are more concerned with how young people behave in the setting, than we are about what young people might create then we have failed them. Equally to deny them the right to engage because of their behaviour is to fail them.
Everything should be designed to make the young people more comfortable. The classroom itself is a reminder of all those experiences that have gone before. All the shame and humiliation that fuels the anger is tied to the arrangement of that space; the brightness of those lights, the noise of those corridors, the sit still and do as you’re told.
It doesn't matter if they sit on the edge of the table while they engage with you. It doesn't matter if they kick out at the table leg while they pluck up the courage to talk. Just below the surface is a world of pain and anger. So if they are there at all celebrate it.
If we add to the white noise in their heads, if we become just another person telling them how wrong every little thing they do is. Then we facilitate their disengagement. This is not naughtiness this is a test.
I still destroy my relationships I have had a lot of therapy and I still catch myself doing things that will test the people around me.
What they are asking is;
Are you just like the rest? Are you going to view me through that lens again? Are you going to reject me? Are you going to add to the pile? Or are you going to be one of the few that help me to relax in my own skin.
We will not stop the behavior with the weight of more failure.
When you offer young people the opportunity to create something of their own, the process usually begins with a period of mistrust. They expect you to take over, they expect you to tell them they are doing it wrong, they expect you to tell them it is not good enough, they expect you to give up.
The education system does these things to them systematically. A well-rounded individual, with all the support they need from family and friends, who has always been told they are brilliant, can thrive in these conditions and rally against them to better themselves. Those of us who have had a different experience of life inside and outside of education, who have not been propped up adequately, find the constant test of the standard education system to be just another weight of failure.
There is then a period where they become interested in the process but are unwilling to participate for fear of failure. "If I try will it be another fall? I can't take another fall." If we as practitioners can support them through this stage and encourage creativity and open them up to the concept that art has no right or wrong that art is a world of expression that will accommodate anyone, that it can be anything, made by anyone, at anytime, we begin to see young people find successes in themselves.
As they begin to engage creatively there is a period of discovery not just of how to do things, but of wanting to do things, of making choices, of wanting to share what has been made, of wanting to be seen and heard.
On sharing their work, which for a disengaged child, is far more traumatic and scary and they must, therefore, be offered the choice not to. We can start to see a change in the way they perceive themselves. On seeing themselves through the light of the success of what they have created, young people are lit up from the inside and even if this is only for a brief moment in time it is brilliant to see and it is a privilege to be a part of the process.