Helping Young People Find Their Voice

by Jenny Cheung

I’ve been helping young people to sing together for many years. I started as a volunteer when my own children were at primary school and their music teacher was having cancer treatment, so I took on the choir. I’d been leading choirs in various settings since I was a teenager and the school choir, another community choir and the SU singing residentials I ran were the highlights of my life, so in 2018 I decided to take the plunge, leave my job and set up The Voice Project. I now work with 5 primary schools very week – 2 in North Lanarkshire, 1 in South Lanarkshire, 1 in North Ayrshire and 1 in Glasgow. All of my schools are in areas where money is tight and the schools use their Pupil Equity Fund to bring me in. I also run 7 community choirs, mostly in similar sort of areas.

Sociologists have discovered that one of the factors in taking any community from surviving to thriving is the addition of the arts, and I think it’s no coincidence that as we have seen arts funding and music provision being cut in communities and schools, so we have seen more and more problems springing up. Music, and singing specifically, has been proven to change a person’s brain chemistry – raising the levels of endorphins and oxytocin (the stuff that makes us feel connected to one another). Singing together in a group can have profound effects on the participants. I could tell you a hundred different stories of people who tell me how singing is saving their life in any given season.

In all honesty, schools right now feel like very difficult places to be. There is less and less money for essentials – one of the council areas I work in has axed 450 teaching jobs for next year – and the demands placed on staff become ever more unreasonable. The inclusion of young people with additional support needs is wonderful if those needs are being supported but, frankly, those needs are not being met in many schools, simply because there’s not enough money to adequately resource classrooms with extra staff members. As a result, classes often feel like battlegrounds where you never know what’s going to kick off next. I rarely meet a teacher who is not thinking on some level about how to get out of teaching.

The impact both of Covid and the fact that most children now seem surgically attached to their smartphones means that our young people are increasingly disconnected from real life and unable to concentrate for more than a minute or two on any given task. It is a struggle for many groups to maintain concentration long enough to get through a song together.

I realise I may be painting a very bleak picture indeed, and honestly I’m not sure where we go from here as a society, but I do know that the work I do makes a different in the very small pockets that I find myself in. I know that children with the most traumatic back stories can find huge joy in singing in the school choir. Singing may not change their home circumstances, but it can give them an escape into another realm just for a few minutes in the school day. And for some young people, the skills they learn in singing and working together with others many provide a gateway into a life they had not expected later on.

Many of the young people I work with receive bursary places on our Voice Camps (for which we partner with SU Holidays) and seeing the differences in them outside of their usual world can be quite remarkable. We have been going long enough now to see some of our young people coming onto our team and that is incredibly special. Quite often our team members will pause in the midst of something and remark, “Look what we made together!”

As a Jesus-follower, I am encouraged by verses in Jeremiah 29 where God’s people are exhorted to “seek the peace and prosperity of the city” in which they find themselves. There are a million things that I have absolutely no control over and no way of making right, but I can seek peace and prosperity for those I work with by helping them to find their voices and sing together.

Jenny Cheung leads The Voice Project Scotland, which you can find on social media and at www.thevoiceprojectscotland.co.uk Voice camps can be booked at www.suholidays.org.uk/voice