Amplify Your Voice

This article is taken from Y ME? (because it’s Your Music Education), May 2019, guest edited by Amplify, a Blaze Arts project. This newsletter hopes to provide young musicians and music enthusiasts with guidance on how to continue their music studies and advice for future music careers.

Y ME? is written by young people for young people. Sign up to the mailing list or email info@musicmark.org.uk to contribute to the next edition.

Cieran Nield (centre) and other members of Amplify presenting at the Music Mark Annual Conference 2018

The Amplify Story

by Cieran Nield

In September 2018 a group of five like minded young people from Preston, all with different musical backgrounds, came together to discuss what we believe should change within music education in Lancashire. Our aim is to voice young people’s ideas in order to influence change at a strategic level.

We strongly believe that music should be available to everyone and that the government does not value music education the same way they do science, technology, engineering and maths.

The Lancashire Music Hub signalled that they had similar ideas in building music centres where students can learn all aspects of music outside of school, including: performance, theory, production, education, and technology.

We presented on a national scale at the Music Mark conference, in front of various other music hub members. We felt like we got everyone on board with our ideas. Whilst at the Music Mark conference we teamed up with CYAC – Croydon’s Youth Arts Collective who shared similar ambitions to us in making the arts as a whole a much more prominent thing in education and within local areas at the least.

After Music Mark we wanted to reflect on what was a great achievement for us. We thought that as we were only a small group of people from Lancashire who had an idea, we needed to broaden the amount of opinions from other young people. We wanted to ‘Amplify’ young people’s ideas and wishes.

In the next phase of the project we are collecting a wide amount of young people’s opinions (from primary school to first year University students’) on what they like/liked within music education and what they would like to see change. We are going to present our results at an event in front of Music Hub board members as well as music students who will participate, in a formal/informal manner with live music performed by young musicians.

Amplify is at the start of our journey and we are looking on to bigger and greater things; and we are grateful for the platform we have been given.

Do you have an opinion on Music Education you want to voice? Now’s your chance to influence change!

Amplify’s current focus is to gain a wider range of young people’s voices, not just in the North West but nationally. To carry out this research we as a group designed a music education survey. Our goal for this survey is to reach as many young people as possible and the information gathered will be used as evidence to inform the future of music education.

We would really appreciate you taking 5 minutes to complete the survey and share it with people you know. It will make a massive difference to the way music education is delivered to other young people!

Follow this link to have your say : https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/amplifymusic

Thank you in advance!