Scottish Primary School Glee Challenge Workshops

Aim

Our Glee Challenge will in 2020 bring a range of benefits to 7000 children. Our aim is to support all our children by holding 200 workshops.

The Scottish Primary Schools Glee Challenge  #ThisisGlee

Our Glee Challenge is designed to provide and widen opportunities for children and young people by providing a flexible, child centred, accessible song and dance initiative which can help support the needs of children, the school community and the wider curriculum. We strongly believe in creating equality of opportunity so participation in the Challenge is free as are the workshops designed to support it. Without any funding we have established the Challenge as one of the largest music initiatives in Scotland.

We are different from other singing initiatives not only because we bring song, dance and performance together but we focus on music of the moment, music that young people identify with and that relates to their lives. Our Challenge has been built from the ground up and schools return year on year because it is dynamic, accessible and overall a massive amount of fun. It releases, encourages and develops creativity allowing children freedom to experiment and play with ideas, developing new solutions and options. 

The Workshops

Over the years we have found that the children and the schools need support in order to maximise the benefits that Glee provides. One way of doing this is through workshops where our tutors work with each Glee choir for 1 hour - last year we ran 170 workshops. This year our intention is to run 200 workshops so we need help to put tutors on the ground to do this.

The tutors help participating schools achieve the benefits the schools themselves report namely improved  health and well-being, attendance, behaviour, achievement as well as improved confidence and interpersonal development. Glee also gives schools unique opportunities in supporting children to engage across the four contexts for learning within the Curriculum for Excellence – Life and Work of the School, Personal Achievement, Discreet Teaching and Interdisciplinary Learning. 

The Challenge represents a series of challenges for the school and children from forming the choir, maintaining and motivating the Glee choir, developing the skills in the choir, rehearsing, preparation and performance. While for the children there are a range of challenges from joining, committing to practice, learning new skills, persevering through to performing. Our workshops can and do make a difference and help provide a basis for the development of these skills .

The Benefits of Glee

All the evidence indicates that music, song and dance, does make a positive difference to schools and the Glee Challenge provides a safe, accessible, cost effective and sustainable approach to realising some of these benefits. Our Challenge does make a difference so your pledge will help us deliver these workshops the cost equates to £1/child so we do our best to keep our costs as low as possible. If we are lucky enough to raise additional funds they too will help fund developments such as the development of a festival based programme for the final and a transport hardship fund for schools.

All children deserve equal opportunity to the performing arts and our Glee Challenge provides an amazing learning experience and unique access to the performing arts. Your pledge will help us consolidate and grow even further. Thank you.

This project successfully funded on 31st January 2020