Barnsley Youth Choir's achievements show value of children learning music: Christa Ackroyd

Exams are simply a step along the way and you can read the results as you please. They can either spur you on to work harder, or more importantly tell you what potentially you may be good at. But they absolutely don’t, and never will, define you. What you do with them does.

Some of the cleverest people I know achieved, at best, average exam results. Some of those who sailed through them never really used them to determine what they wanted to do in life, because they appeared, on paper, to be good at everything so the choices were almost too plentiful. I was certainly not one of them

It is hard to remember exactly what grades I got and not because of my age but because, apart from my initial job interview, I never had to list them. Suffice it to say a summary may have looked like this. English great, maths appalling, sciences nil, history and the research it entailed good, arts and creative subjects enjoyable. (I would say life enhancing). And as for physics and chemistry, one I didn’t understand the other

I couldn’t care less about so I dropped them as soon as I could, never to contemplate them again.

And so it was easy to determine I would never be a mathematician, a rocket scientist or a biologist but instead what is termed now a ‘creative’. No matter – all I ever wanted to be was a writer and a journalist.

So that worked out just fine. But what I learned outside that much less rigid curriculum than that of today, stayed with me then until now. There is more to life than being able to regurgitate facts. Sometimes you just have to feel and that is enough. It is what marks us out as I said a few weeks ago from the robots we are told will take over our lives.

It could be sport, it could be growing things, it could be making things that suddenly sparks a lifelong passion that you may be lucky enough to use and enjoy forever, but for me there were two subjects, subjects which I believe are now considered unnecessary and so almost unworthy, which made me into me and gave me everything I ever needed, then and now.

I was never tested in music and drama, not even sure it was possible at my school, but what they gave me added to a natural grasp of English was the total key to any success I am deemed to have enjoyed. Good music makes the hairs stand up in the back of your neck. Cutting up a frog in biology made be feel sick.

This year has seen the lowest exam results in music for more than a decade due entirely to the fact that the number of pupils taking them has declined by at least 40 per cent at A level. It is easy to see why. The creative arts, in the traditional sense, are no longer deemed essential in the way we test our young people.

School budgets are tight, and what is therefore deemed a luxury has gone. It is not a luxury. It is what starts many of us to explore our inner selves. To be moved listening to a piece of music is one thing, to sing it, play it and be enveloped by it remains an experience implanted in our brain.

When I was at school music was taught to all from a very young age. I had the chance to learn a musical instrument at no cost and chose the violin, which is not pretty when you are learning, as my mum and dad could testify. I instantly fell in love with it and so learned piano at home and sang in the school choir. I was not the best, but I absolutely cherished what it brought me. The joy of all music lives with me now. And the singing, oh the singing, taught me to be part of a team in the choir, to strive for perfection in harmony with others and to take a deep breathe and go for it when it came to the solos I was asked to sing. I still think back and realise that nothing will ever make me as nervous again. It made me perform to the best of my abilities. It also taught me that no matter how clever I thought I was, and I wasn’t, there was always someone, often someone surprising who emerged from the shadows of academia and performed with the voice of an angel. She, or he was the person I wanted to be, not the person who understood algebra or Pythagoras’s theorem.

What we are doing in schools which the academics think is making us cleverer is actually the very opposite. We are dumbing down. We are limiting our children’s experiences, not enhancing them and rather than creating a level playing field, by excluding music, or drama from their lives, we are missing out on developing talent which enriches us all. By telling our young people they are skills which don’t matter in life means we are all the poorer for it. This is not education for all. It is education in all that we deem is good for them to get on in life and what was once free is now often charged for, so for some cannot be experienced.

This week I saw the proof of the importance of music and performance in all its wondrous glory when two friends and I made the 400 mile round trip in a day to the Edinburgh Fringe with one sole purpose, to hear a choir, not just any choir but my beloved Barnsley Youth Choir. Two weeks ago they represented Great Britain in the Olympics of choral music at the World Choir Games. They were rehearsed to within a breath, yet they were by no means certain of even a medal let alone gold. They were competing against the best in the world and against choirs that were of all ages and some at schools established to do so. And yet they emerged as winners and champions and their lives will be changed forever because of that experience.

On paper these are ordinary kids. It is what they achieved together which is extraordinary and will propel them forwards having learned valuable life lessons of hard work, dedication, self belief, comradeship, team work, discipline and joy, yes joy in their hearts at striving for the almost impossible.

Seventy volunteers, a dedicated choir master Mat Wright and his team believe in them. They are not posh kids. Fundraising efforts means it is within the grasp of them all if they have the talent and determination they each show. But their lives will be transformed because of all the choir has achieved, a choir set up in what was once one of the most deprived areas of our county.

Thousands of people saw them perform at the Fringe. Their reviews all echo one thing. They are sublime and the joy they bring themselves, each other and the sell out audiences they perform to will never be forgotten.

Every time I hear them sing I cry. I cry because of the gift of music taught to me in just two very short years at school. I cry because it moves me to hear them but it moves me more to think of all they will achieve in the future because of what it has brought them. That they can and they will succeed. Music gives us soul. Drama gives us performance. Maths is just numbers on paper. And trigonometry .. I have absolutely no idea.