Music for Education & Wellbeing Anita Holford

 A hate crime and a near death experience caused Ami Gaston to re-evaluate her life and future. She now works internationally to promote healing and wellbeing through music and activism. She’s worked with refugees and families through organisations such as the US government and the United Nations. She also has a great story to tell about performing for the Dalai Lama. 

 In this episode, I talk with Serona Elton, from the University of Miami and the Mechanical Licensing Collective; and Dr Oliver Morris, Head of Education and Skills at UK Music. We talked about their routes into the music industry, and the challenges and opportunities for young people – and their families - wanting to understand what roles they could pursue in music.  

 In this episode, I talk with Penny Osmond, workshop and choir leader, about her singing work with new mums who have perinatal mental health disorders. We discuss the first randomised control research in this area, led by Professors Rosie Perkins and Daisy Fancourt, which found that singing could relieve moderate to severe post-natal depression at double the rate of control groups. We also hear about Penny’s wider music and perinatal mental health programmes including Songs from Home – addressing social isolation in new mums through online songwriting, and Music at Heart, singing with mothers referred through a hospital. 

In this episode, I talk with Emma Supica, Education Coordinator for Artiphon, a music tech company that creates new instruments to enable everyone to be creative, with or without prior musical experience. It’s latest is the Orba, a palm-held instrument that can be used alone or connected to other technology. We talked about the importance of play in music; how the Orba is being used in education, wellbeing and social justice settings and can be adapted for different people and environments; and the value of participant and user voice in education and in tech. 

 In this episode, I talk with Mark Robinson, the founder of Rocksteady Music School, which brings in-school rock band lessons to primary schools across the UK. It’s a new model for music education that combines peripatetic tuition approaches with group rock band tuition and inclusive pedagogy, increasing children’s interest in and uptake of music lessons. Mark’s lightbulb moment was when he realised that children in his lunchtime band workshops were progressing faster than those in one-to-one lessons, and his mission ever since has been to get more children making music by choosing what they want to learn, and learning as part of a band. 

 In this episode, I talk with musicians Carl aka C. Roots, and Grace from Inhouse Records. Inhouse is an award-winning record label for change, working inside and outside of prisons with emerging musicians who are prisoners. The team work to highlight the creative potential of prisoners and to reduce reoffending, focusing on what's strong, not what's wrong.  They’re supported by a range of impressive partners and funders from the Universal Music Group to the Ministry of Justice, and have won awards for their social enterprise work