What is Youth Music?

Youth Music is the UK’s largest children’s music charity, set up in 1999 to promote and support music making opportunities and to provide advice to children from birth - 18 with the least access, including some of the UK’s most disadvantaged young people.  Youth Music works alongside the formal and community-based sectors to support music-making and training. 

How is it funded?

The charity’s funding complements music in the National Curriculum by supporting activities held mainly outside of school hours and delivered by non-profit making organisations.  

Youth Music is one of the National Lottery’s great success stories.  Since its launch, Youth Music has reached over 1.75 million children and young people, encouraging their talents, building their confidence and transforming the landscape of musical opportunity throughout the UK.  The music-making supported is of the widest variety, from hip-hop and dj-ing to classical and jazz. 

Youth Music occupies a unique position – distributing £10m per year of Lottery funding on behalf of Arts Council England.  Despite its success, Youth Music aspires to reach out to ever increasing numbers of young people across the country.  The vision is to create a sustainable environment to channel young peoples’ creativity, enabling them to express themselves and develop their skills through music.  The overall aim is to reach 3 million children and young people by 2010. 

What work does it do and how is it run?

Youth Music funds 23 Youth Music Action Zones in England and Wales, providing workshops, rehearsals, performances, one-to-one teaching and mentoring.

Youth Music also aims to support wider aspects of music-making through funding training for music leaders, as well as working strategically to bring together partnership organisations from across the music, education and social sectors.  

Youth Music has regional co-ordinators who work in their local communities to promote the work of Youth Music at a grassroots level.  They operate in their regions, working with Youth Music Action Zones, gathering information and contacts and acting as a  central point of information exchange in their local musical community.  

Youth Music encourages debate about music education and the provision of music-making activities for young people. Youth Music is currently managing the Music Mentors programme – part of the government’s Respect Agenda, Gallery 37 plus – a cross-arts programme for young people not in education, employment or training – funded by the Big Lottery Fund, and a Young Ambassadors Programme, ensuring young people have a say in the music education debate.

Youth Music distributes its funds in a variety of ways including

• Open Programmes - open for general application
• Partnership Programmes - potential partnership organisations invited to submit proposals
• Youth Music Action Zones - solicited applications from regional consortiums
• Youth Music initiatives - initiatives or events that complement the above programmes

In most cases organisations will be applying for Open Programmes, but the following list of conditions applies to all Youth Music funding:

What we currently fund:

• Funding is available to not-for-profit organisations over a period of six to 24 months
• Participants must be 0-18 (or up to 25 year olds with special educational needs (SEN), disabilities or in detention)
• Music-making activity must take place principally outside of school hours (except for children aged 0-5 years and young people with SEN or in detention
• Organisations over one year old
• Activities that involve training and development
• Structured music-making activities which are planned to advance children and young people's music skills
  

What we currently cannot fund:

• Instrument purchase
• Profit making organisations
• Management development
• Activities that have already taken place
• Fundraising events or competitions
• Capital projects
• Core funding for organisations
• Individual schools (we can only fund a consortium of schools made up of two or more institutions)
• Individuals – such as students or young musicians
• Equipment purchase – although 5% of the allocated budget is available for equipment purchase (10% in the Make It Sound programme)
• One-off events and trips
• Projects of less than six months in length
• Two programmes running at the same time
  Download Guidelines for Repeat Applicants (Word 27KB)
• Activities that take place outside England. Youth Music receives National Lottery funding through Arts Council England so is presently unable to fund projects in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales
  Information about the other UK nations

Useful links

Find out about Youth Music funding in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales

For more specific funding information or to make an application, visit our Looking for Funding section

For more detailed information on Youth Music read our FAQs

Youth Music and Sing Up
Youth Music is leading the consortium which is managing Sing Up, a national programme of singing activity for primary school-aged children in England.  Sing Up is a £40 million government investment over 4 years which aims to ensure that good quality singing is central to young children’s lives, in primary schools, in the home and in the wider community.

The government’s investment in Sing Up came about as a result of the work of the Music Manifesto’s Singing Workstream which was chaired by Howard Goodall and led by Youth Music. Youth Music was a founding signatory to the Music Manifesto and has supported its campaign for improvement in music education since July 2004.

Youth Music’s role is to oversee the strategic and financial management of Sing Up and to take particular responsibility for:

• Publishing the Sing Up magazine and website
• Management systems for the ‘Sing Up Communities’ and ‘Hearts and Minds’ Sing Up projects
• Management of the media campaign 
• Research and evaluation
• The central point for all general enquiries relating to Sing Up
• Developing a Music Start pack for parents to use with their 2 – 5 year old children.

Hearts & Minds Projects

The Sing Up programme’s overall aim is to increase opportunities for children throughout the country to enjoy singing as part of their everyday lives. To this end, some funding is being distributed immediately to organisations with a strong track record in singing project delivery to fund 18 ‘Hearts and Minds’ Sing Up projects around England.
 
On top of this Sing Up has funded a further 8 new ‘Sing Up Communities’ (in addition to 4 funded by Youth Music) and supported 4 clusters of schools to improve singing activity in their extended schools programme, through their partnership work with ContinYou.

Overall, £977,760 has been committed so far to funded programmes: £629,300 to Hearts and Minds, £329,460 to Sing Up Communities and £29,000 to Continyou Clusters. All of these projects are designed to have an immediate effect on the lives of children, through sustainable singing activity with children and teachers. Hearts and Minds projects are short term programmes finishing in March 2008 that encompass activity such as training for young leaders, county wide singing projects, composition and ongoing teacher training projects. The organisations running the activities range from the education departments of performance groups such as the CBSO, Opera North and Black Voices to established training and delivery organisations such as the Association of British Choral Directors and The Voices Foundation. 

The Sing Up Communities are run by a range of different groups including music services, community groups, independent arts organisations and a primary schools cluster. These programmes will deliver ongoing activity over 2 years with the aim of creating sustainable singing communities that will outlast the duration of the project.

It is hoped that the outcomes of all of these projects will show how much singing can benefit children in and out of their school lives, contributing to our campaign to raise national awareness on this subject.