As the 2024-5 academic year is well underway, Sutton Music Trust continues in its mission to help every young person in the borough to make, be inspired by, and celebrate the music they love. A key way in which we do this is to keep the youth voice at the heart of our mission and ensure we continue to understand more about children and young people’s musical preferences, their exposure to music education, and what our key focus areas might be for increasing student engagement.
Every year we send out our youth voice survey, What Music Means to You to students in years 6, 7 and 8 via their school. In the survey we ask what types of music the students like, how well they feel their school caters to their musical interests, how much they make music and in what form.
In Summer 2024, 2380 students completed the survey.
How important is music in your life?
The survey asks students to rate the importance of music in their lives from 1-10, where 1 means not important at all, and 10 means “I can’t live without it.” Once again, the average score was over 7 out of 10 (7.2) and across all year groups, 34% scored 9 or 10.
What are your favourite types of music?
When asked what types of music they liked, 39% put Pop Music as their first choice. The second and third favourite genres were Rap & Hip Hop, and Electronic Dance Music.
Making music
Making music on a computer or device was the most popular way in which respondents make music, with 1057 students making music in this form.
When asked “how often you get to learn about, listen to, and play your favourite styles of music at school?”, the average score was 4.8 out of 10.
Interestingly, when asked about the ways in which students perform or make music, over 1100 said they don’t regularly do this.
Suggestions and Ideas
When asked for their ideas and suggestions around what forms of music making students would like to get involved in across Sutton, common answers were:
- Composing and songwriting
- More opportunities to make pop, hip-hop, and rap music
- Music technology
- Musical theatre
- Battle of the Bands
- More opportunities to perform in bands
- More opportunities to sing - either in choirs or singing competitions
Get involved! What do we offer?
We are pleased to say that Sutton Music Trust is already offering some activities that pupils would like to participate in.
During term, we run a Music Production club and Songwriters Circle at our Wednesday Academy in Wallington.
We run Up Next, which is a termly event for young people in Sutton to perform in bands or individually. Performances range from a DJ set to performance of original material.
Sutton Music Trust also offers choirs that are suitable for young people, which are the Sutton Young Singers and Sutton Youth Choir – who have recently moved to a new venue.
Looking forward, we want to ensure we continue to remove barriers students may experience in accessing existing musical opportunities. We will also continue to work with our Advisory Board and Youth Voice to ensure we provide more musical opportunities for our children and young people.
#MakeMusicWithUs
