Researching the first year of the National Singing Programme Sing Up in England: An initial impact evaluation.

Abstract

The article reports on the first year of an independent evaluation ofthe National Singing Programme 'Sing Up' (2007-2011 in England. The aim of the Sing Up Programme is to provide all primary-aged children (up to the age of 11 years) with opportunities for singing under high quality vocal leadership both within their school curriculum and outside of school on a regular basis. As part of the evaluation, members of the research team msited 81 schools across England, and assessed the singing behamor and development of 3,762 individual children using the combination of two established rating scales. The focus was on providing an initial profile of children's singing prior to the launch of the National Programme and, subsequently later in the first year, to conduct a small number of additional visits to see if there was any evidence of early impact. The results confirm that children's singing is subject to developmental processes, with variations related to sex, age and ethnicity. There is also some evidence that, ru)twithstanding such variations, a programme of sustained singing education can have a positive benefit on children's singing behaviors and development.

Sex, Gender and Singing Development: Making a Positive Difference to Boys’ Singing Through a National Programme in England

“…Brown, Martinez, Hodges, Fox, & Parsons, 2004;Brown, Martinez, & Parsons, 2006) -it is normal for some children's vocal pitch matching to be less accurate in the early phases of singing development (cf. Rutkowski, 1997;Welch, 1986;Welch et al, 2009). However, simpler, more purely musical structures -in the sense that there are no words attached that are required to be learned at the same time, such as in the singing of single pitches and patterns of pitches (e.g.…”

“…Subsequent data analyses revealed sex differences related both to developmental singing behaviours and also in children's attitudes to singing (Welch et al, 2010). In general, based on an analysis of n = 11,388 individual singing assessments, girls were rated as significantly more developed in their singing competency compared to boys for each participant age group (Fig.…”

“…Across the opening three school years of Sing Up (2007Up ( -2010, a research team from the Institute of Education, London 5 visited 177 schools nationally and collected individual data from 9,979 children (Welch, Himonides, Saunders, & Papageorgi, 2010). Some of the children were seen more than once as part of a longitudinal focus, resulting in a total of 11,388 assessments of individual children's singing being made.…”

Methodological Perspectives on Singing Accuracy

“…See Demorest and Pfordresher (this volume) for data comparing this acoustic scoring procedure to human judgment. At present, the easiest way to score singing a song reliably is through the use of a rating procedure (Demorest & Pfordresher, this volume;Welch, et al, 2010;Wise & Sloboda, 2008). These global rating procedures, while reliable, do not provide very sensitive measures regarding the nature or location of the difficulty a singer might have within a melody.…”

“…Count backwards from ten quickly. Previous studies (Harries, Griffin, Walker, & Hawkins, 1996;Welch et al, 2010) have used this procedure to identify a person's mean comfortable speaking pitch that is predictive of their singing pitch. b.…”