Silence in the classroom

Schools are not alive with the sound of music, and they should be. What can be done to halt the decline of singing?

Singing is good for you. It is a healthy activity and good exercise. It helps you to express yourself, to release pent-up feelings. Singing with others, in groups or choirs, is uniting, uplifting and a lifelong source of pleasure. And everyone can do it - provided they are given enough encouragement when young.

The problem is that, all too often, they are not. The past 30 years have seen a serious decline in singing in schools. Recent inspection reports by the Office for Standards in Education indicate that children's singing often deteriorates when they transfer to secondary school because too little is expected of them. A 1991 survey by the British Federation of Young Choirs, based on returns from 3,326 schools, found that 85 per cent of secondary schools had no curriculum singing.

Susan Lansdale, BFYC director, believes that changes in teaching styles since the Fifties and Sixties, with less teaching from the front, as well as changes in the music curriculum, with more emphasis on creating and exploring sounds using instruments like electronic keyboards, have contributed to the decline in singing. Many teachers, she says, lack the confidence to use their singing voices in front of a class.

Children model the way they sing very much on what they hear from the teacher, says Janice Chapman, chair of the British Voice Association. If the teacher sings with confidence, even if she doesn't have a marvellous voice, the children will do the same, but a lacklustre performance will produce poor results.

To sing reasonably well, teachers need to have some knowledge of how the voice works. But Professor Graham Welch, Dean of the Faculty of Education at Roehampton Institute, in London, complains that because of the increasing amounts of time trainee teachers spend in the classroom, there is no time to prepare them properly. Speaking in a noisy, overheated classroom - let alone singing - already creates serious vocal problems for many teachers.

For children learning to sing, the early years at primary school are crucial. According to research by Professor Welch and others, all young children are capable of improving their ability to sing in tune, if they are given simple vocal pitch tasks. What tends to happen, however, is that confronted with complete songs some of them get worse, because they concentrate on the words rather than on matching pitch. What would help, Professor Welch argues, is to learn the tune and words separately before putting them together.

Boys fare worse than girls, the research shows. By the age of seven, up to a third of children are singing "out of tune", and two or three times as many of these are boys as girls. "By the time they reach 11, there is a hard core of boys - 6 to 10 per cent - who are not singing in tune," says Professor Welch. "Then they find their voice starting to change physically - and they become even more disenfranchised."

With the onset of adolescence, singing becomes, particularly for boys, a source of embarrassment. "When you sing, you give away what you really are, your inner essence - it's like being asked to take your clothes off," says Tom Scratchley, a BFYC choral teacher in Kent, who helps schools to develop choral work.

Rather than asking gawky, reluctant teenage boys to sing straight out, Mr Scratchley finds a better approach is to get them talking about how they have changed physically - how much they have grown, what has happened to their speaking voices, to their Adam's apple. "That gets them interested: I find boys are quite curious about their new voices - and we are usually singing in two parts by the end of an hour."

Finding suitable repertoire for teenagers is not easy - and music publishers would do well to address this, says Janice Chapman. Richard Frostick, music inspector for Islington, runs a Saturday music centre for 400 local children from six to 17, and says he spends a good deal of time arranging music to suit changing voices - anything from 14th century rounds and canons, to "Let It Be" and drinking songs from La Traviata.

"Young people love to do unusual repertoire. Teachers often underestimate what the pupils are capable of, but they shouldn't just stick to popular music. They should take risks, show a bit of daring: children will accept anything of quality."

British Federation of Young Choirs: 01509 211664.