Youth Music Impact Report 2018-19
Introduction from Matt Griffiths, CEO of Youth Music
2019 marks Youth Music’s 20th anniversary. And what a year it’s been!
Over the past two decades, more than 2.9 million children and young people have regularly made music through the projects we invest in across England, achieving powerful personal, social and musical outcomes as a result.
We’ve been supported by the National Lottery via Arts Council England from our foundation in 1999, and this has been our backbone of support ever since. 2019 also celebrates 25 years since the first National Lottery draw in 1994. Without it we would simply not exist. #ThanksToYou
This report sets out our impact in the 2018/19 financial year, analysing qualitative and quantitative data gathered between April 2018 and March 2019. We invested a total of £9,041,480 in music-making projects across England. And we’re contributing to the sustainability of the music education sector too - for every £1 we invested, projects generated an additional 76p of matched funding from other sources. Our Alliance for a Musically Inclusive England founder members have continued to work collectively for change, supporting Music Education Hubs to embed inclusive, diverse practice in all that they do.
Young people are at the heart of Youth Music’s work, and our investment continues to focus on those who need it most. In 2018/19, 83,000 children and young people took part in music-making activities. We work particularly with those who don’t get to make music because of who they are, where they live, or what they’re going through. 87% of participants were recorded as experiencing barriers to participation.
We’ve really stepped up a gear in 2019. We started in January with the launch of our Sound of the Next Generation report, a comprehensive review of young people’s relationship with music, produced in collaboration with Ipsos MORI. It provided ground-breaking insights about young people’s lives in music and music-making, bringing to life the positive and meaningful impact it has for them.
In May we hit the headlines with our Exchanging Notes report, a culmination of four years of action research with our partners at Birmingham City University. Young people participating in the projects we support often comment that in school they are given less autonomy over their own learning, and that the curriculum can feel disconnected from their musical lives. Exchanging Notes looked at addressing this by bringing community music organisations together with secondary school music teachers to co-design innovative curricula, learning and benefitting from each other’s expertise. We found that focusing on young people’s existing interests in music helped to improve their view of themselves and school life, attendance among disengaged pupils, and their approach to learning. We believe it’s time to reimagine the music curriculum and how it is taught in school by scaling up the Exchanging Notes approach through more local partnerships. #StormzyANDMozart
In August, we were delighted to announce that we’ve become a promoting society of People’s Postcode Lottery. Players of People’s Postcode Lottery have been supporting our work for the past six years through the Postcode Culture Trust. But now we’re set to receive a significant increase in investment. This means we can do new things we’ve always dreamed of: growing the Youth Music model beyond England, working directly with young people and supporting young adults from aged 18 upwards to progress their music and careers.
October 2019 saw our first ever Youth Music Awards in association with Hal Leonard Europe, which took place in the amazing Grand Hall at Battersea Arts Centre. The Youth Music Awards celebrated the powerful musical, social and personal achievements of young people making music in the projects we fund, together with the dedicated workforce supporting them. There were 12 awards categories, more than 60 music industry judges, 300 audience members, and dozens of young musicians performing live. What a night! We’re already making plans for next year’s event.
The Youth Music Awards also saw the launch of our Youth Music Creatives programme, offering paid opportunities to young people to help us and, in doing so, support their own career progression. A team of 16 Youth Music Creatives worked on the night as bloggers, videographers, photographers, illustrators, production runners, and as the event hosts. As a Living Wage Funder and Employer, we want to put an end to the culture of unpaid work in the music industry and we were very proud that we were recognised as a Funding Champion at this year’s Living Wage Champion Awards in June.
It’s been a fantastic year but there’s so much more to do. It’s a time of great social, political and environmental uncertainty - even more so for young people. Communities continue to feel the significant effects of years of austerity: cuts to youth services, schools, unstable housing conditions, increases in hate crime for example. Discussions about mental health are much more high profile (a good thing of course) but this needs to lead to positive actions moving beyond the words. The music industry lacks diversity and is challenging for many young people to break into, particularly for those living outside London and with limited financial means. These are all complex, deep-rooted issues, which of course music and music-making can’t solve on its own. But we know the transformative power of music-making to provide innovative solutions and this is what we will continue to fight for: on behalf of, and increasingly with, young people.
Whatever your connection to music education or the music industry, you can help us to make these changes. Join us to support young people’s lives in music.
Photo by Amos Mukombero: T-Roadz, 14-year-old rapper from The Pump in Birmingham, winner of the Youth Music Award 2019 for Outstanding Act.