The Project

Hitting the Right Note is a project running in Norfolk and Norwich produced by Creative Arts East in partnership with Dralion, Norfolk Youth and Community Service to provide tutoring and MC’ing to At Risk young people in the surrounding area. The project builds on an already established working relationship to deliver group based projects as a development from working on a one to one basis with a small number of isolated young people who are clients of Dralion.

While the project commits to giving young people professional development opportunities, it also seeks to influence the senior policy-making levels of the region’s youth justice sectors. The programme piloted a mentoring programme, templates for best practice and a workshop placement scheme to promote the progression and support of young people. This workshop-based music and DJ’ing programme was for young people referred by specialist agencies and culminated in a showcase event.

The target group engaging with this programme included young offenders and those at risk of offending, exclusion or disengagement from education or wider society, between 13 and 18 years old.  The aim was to encourage participants to work in a variety of genres and to broaden their horizons both musically and in terms of the service provision and experiences currently available to them. To facilitate the project aims, the following key strategies were employed:

Key Project Strategies

• Recruiting young people who would get the most benefit
  ‘Because of how the partnership works and because both Ellie’s and my passion were those most At Risk young people, the routes for recruiting those people to the project were already set. We put publicity out through the channels that we knew would work, Connexions PA, Tier 2 drugs workers, directly through health and community workers and into schools projects and through youth offending teams’
• Using music forms of interest to young people
  ‘A number of young people were interested in doing some music making, the majority of them were interested in DJ’ing and playing in a rock band and those are the two genres we offered’
• Setting the right expectations through pre briefing of participants
  ‘I chose to speak individually to the young people prior to the project to make sure what they thought they were getting into was what they were getting into. There is a lot of confusion sometimes amongst young people about being posted off to a project’
• Holistic partnership work
  ‘We were determined to do partnership work with At Risk groups because we had a strong belief that young people are cautious consumers. Young people who have been in the system for a while, all the young people in the At Risk category at any time, will have had an intervention at some point from some service and they become very discerning about what they are getting and what kind of service they are having. Rather than having a youth and community activity based programme, it became clear early on that what we needed was the best we could get in terms of the support structure so hence the partnership with Connexions and Matthew project. In this way housing structures and social service workers were allocated to the young people but they also need the technical expertise through the best of combining music tutors with tutors who were able to engage really well with young people in order for the programme to work’

Young People’s Development

• Learning skills they can be proud of
  ‘Norfolk is horrific for being able to get anywhere and if you’re not engaged in a work structure, not being in that environment, your social skills and confidence, all those attributes that make young people able to make a success of whatever they choose to do are completely lacking. So they came to us and learned skills they could be proud of and made friends with people they perhaps would not have made friends with in their own village so their confidence grew’
   ‘Owen is much more motivated. He will give anything a go. He’s learnt to be a good team player. He’s patient with others and helps them and he has a wider understanding of music’
• Facilitating self control and emotional development
   ‘It keeps them open, it opens up their personality, they stay open. They don’t close down, like you see them do in other situations. It lets them express themselves’
• Giving creative and positive influences at critical life stages
  ‘There are an awful lot of life changes that young people are going through in their teenage years and it is a time when they are strongly influenced by things. If some of those influences are creative and positive about working together they are very important and that is what these projects do’ 
• Improving social skills
  ‘One of the interesting outcomes for the young people with this work is whereas they start off being quite competitive and isolated and nervous when they come in, by the end they are very supportive of one another and working together. Lots of those barriers and prejudices have been lowered or removed. In terms of their own personal growth and their ability to understand and empathise and recognise that weakness in others is not something you necessarily put the dagger into, you are improving their social skills’

From the Young People…

• Meeting the need for challenge
  ‘James’ – aged 16: “Out of all the courses I have done, that is the course I enjoyed the most because it was a challenge. I like the challenge of working with other people on a task. Everybody here is supportive it’s made me more confident about most things really. I’m not very good at all but I’m learning how to do it and I’m quite proud of that.’’
• Giving them something positive to do
  ‘Claire’ – aged 17: “I don’t think enough young people know that it is their right to have stuff like this to do. It’s all kids sitting around winging and saying there is nothing to do but if they got off their arse and found out what there is to do there is lots of stuff. Before I came on this course I wasn’t doing anything at all. I’ve got anxiety problems. It’s got me out of the house and I’ve got a couple of friends. This has given me something to do and people to meet. I feel better about myself. It gives me a hobby for the rest of the week. Otherwise I just sit around doing nothing”
• ‘Simon’ – aged 14: “My dad who I’ve had a lot of trouble with in the past is quite pleased I am going in the right direction. My mum likes me doing this coz it’s made me more relaxed. At school, teachers stress me out. My mum said this has changed me.”
• Facilitating self control and emotional development
  ‘Dean’ – aged 16 “There was a guy who writes lyrics, raps and so on and he was working with us on that and it was about the one to one relationship and using the music as a tool for looking at what is going on for you, how you feel about yourself, about moving on and so on, anger management stuff and things like that. I suffer from depression. If I get angry and down it stays with me for the rest of the day but coming here I don’t get down and depressed. It’s really good”

Family and Community Development

• Faciliating knock-on effects at home
  ‘If a young person at home is living with their parents or carers and clearly is improving with their music making, there is an appreciation so there is a knock on effect at home so their confidence increases and they become productive and if they are at school or in a job or training environment, they have something else to talk about at a higher level than they did before’
• Developing peer support
  ‘The group stuff is all about peer support and receiving it as well as giving it. This is the next stage of development for young people during their adolescent period and there is a lot of self reflection and navel gazing. They can do this on their own musically and then to share it with a group it’s an enormous feedback exercise and they learn to cope with criticism and they learn to cope with praise. It is not directly them – it’s the music that’s being criticised or praised. They are not saying you are a really good person they are saying you are really good at playing the guitar’.
• Providing a support service for schools
  ‘When we first came in to contact with Kirstie the school was saying ‘ God, what do we do with this girl she is incredibly disruptive and we don’t know what to do, we are about to wash our hands of her.’ She is now working. The school did ring us up after she had been involved in the first project and there was a gap and they said ‘please tell us what to do because whilst she was working with you she was on track academically and she really put a lot of work in but now she is going off track again and we don’t know what to do, can you do anything for her. There is a result, being rung by a school and asked to sort this kid out’.
• Giving an insight into a work environment
  ‘Chris’ – aged 17: “The challenge is breaking out of the social groups you are entangled in. When you go to work you are going to be put with people of so many different social backgrounds and just doing this course has given me the insight into that. It is sort of a work environment but you are doing something you enjoy as opposed to something you have to do because you are getting paid for it”

Special Value of Music Making

• It is an identity creator for young people
  ‘Young people’s interests are many and varied but one thing that is important to all young people is the music they listen to and whether it is the same as somebody else’s. By virtue of the fact that they are in their adolescence and forming their own identity and projecting whatever image it is that they want to do, a huge part of that is the music they listen to, how they interpret what lyrics are being sung, all that is a huge part of young people building their own image and identity.’
• It is appealing and safe
  ‘They see it as part of their world and they define themselves through it so there is a much stronger association buy-in than for most other art forms and an ownership that goes on which is important. There is the notion of immediacy and you can hide behind music whereas for some young people using dance or drama as an art form, it can be much more exposing and there is a sense with young people that it is more revealing of them whereas music is more a presentation of them without bearing their own soul’.

Particular Value of DJ’ing

• DJ’ing is cool
  ‘There is a notion that they are being fashionable. Certainly using decks Dj’ing, is seen as something which is quite cool, therefore with the kids who put up a lot of barriers to getting involved with things, you are helping to drop the barriers using that as the carrot’

Sustainable Development

• Community perceive music as an effective tool for engagement
  ‘It has been effective at an individual level. It clearly has been beneficial to those young people and their lives. There is an increasing interest and an understanding that it is a very effective tool for engaging young people amongst a much broader community now. The arts community has woken up to the fact that it is an interesting area of work. In terms of mainstreaming the work, there is the potential there for them to get involved in it. We have the Music Wise advisory group which meets every quarter and has been very impressed at how the other agencies, youth services, Connexions, Creative Partnerships, music services, youth offending teams, social services, children’s services are coming along to those meetings because  they actually want to be engaged in that discussion and see how they can open up opportunities for things to happen’
• Parents see it as having a positive effect
  ‘It’s the first time I’ve seen him do anything like this. It’s brilliant. It’s really helped him get through his last few months of school’. ‘He shows leadership skills when it comes to music. If only he could carry on and develop this, it’s one area where he would develop and improve his self esteem and everything about himself. If he can build his self esteem by working with new people, meeting people that will help him develop personality skills and help him in the real world and getting a job. It’s confidence building, its what he needs. He’s living in a dreadful place at the moment. They’re all up till 4 or 5 in the morning, getting into all sorts and then he can’t get up in the morning. If he did something musical it might tip the balance, change his way of thinking’
• Signposting to other music provision
  ‘We very much try and sign post people on to other things that are happening in music or to the City College where they run music courses and we give information and support on how to go on to those. There is a lot of signposting that goes on, on an individual one to one basis and it’s why it is important that the networks exist and do work and we are aware of what else is happening’
• Participants are entering employment
  ‘Of the half dozen evaluations left over from the project, I went though them the other day and they’re all working and in the majority of cases that’s a fair reflection of the project work. All of them had been quite high maintenance and long term clients within youth services.’
• Participants are returning to school
  ‘An example would be a young woman who went back to school in the end. She came to us because she had been picked up by a Connexions PA. This young lady was zipping through foster homes because her mum had decided that she did not want to live with her any more so even going through the care system in that way she was missing a lot of school. She was able to say “I would like to go back and live with my mum can we do something with my mum so she can see I am doing something useful?” When we had the showcase at the end, she got her mum and foster mum there. Because of how we had set up the showcase we were able to get her mum involved in some dj’ing and she could show her mum how to do it. They were bonding and as a result her mum came to us and said “I cant believe she is doing something useful. I never thought I would see it”. Now she is back living at home and going back to the same school she was at before her mum threw her out’.