Need to Know, Nice to Know, Too Much to Know? Singing With Young People Whose Mental Health Needs Support

The answer to this question shifts with the setting. In a secure unit or a hospital school, detailed information may be available and expected. Arrive for a one-off workshop in a primary school and you may know nothing beyond the year group. Somewhere in between sit the peripatetic teacher who sees a class for an hour a week and the community practitioner running a six-week project.

Practitioners tell us that both ends of that spectrum carry risks. Too little information and you may miss what matters. Too much and you may walk into the room already seeing labels rather than people.

In this session we will look at what is genuinely need to know before you work with a group and what is simply nice to know; how practice adapts when information is detailed, patchy, or absent altogether; who decides what gets shared about a young person and what say young people have in that; the difference between information you need for safeguarding and information you need for your practice; and how to ask better questions of the settings you work in.

Join In

Each of our guests will open with their thoughts, and then it becomes a conversation. Not a panel followed by a polite Q&A. A conversation, with you in it.

Tell us what you’d like us to get into when you register. We read everything that comes in, and it shapes where we go on the day. On the day you can put a thought or a question into the chat whenever it strikes you, or request to come on video and we’ll bring you in. Plenty of people prefer to sit and listen, and that’s completely fine too.

There’s no right answer to any of this. Our guests won’t agree on everything, and we’re not expecting the room to either.

Who’s it for?

Singing leaders, music teachers, vocal practitioners, hub and service leaders, and anyone planning music with young people whose mental health needs support. You don’t need to have read our publication Being Seen, Being Heard, Feeling Connected, though you’re very welcome to.

Our Guests

Yasmin Ali (Y.A. Poet), spoken word artist, lyricist and community practitioner, Lewisham Music Lyricist Collective and Goldsmiths Alchemy

Yasmin is an award-winning British Bangladeshi artist and International Slam Champion from South London. Her trauma-informed practice supports young writers, rappers and poets to build confidence and creative agency, and she founded Blossom Young Mums, a creative support group for teen and young mothers. You may have heard the young artists she works with on the Sing Up Foundation’s Inspiring Voices podcast, in the Young Sessions takeover with Lewisham Music.

Dr Phil Mullen, community musician, researcher and inclusion specialist

Phil has spent more than forty years developing music with people who are socially excluded, specialising in work with children and young people at risk, including eight years in Northern Ireland using music for peace and reconciliation. He works with music hubs, organisations and schools on strategic approaches to inclusion and evaluated Youth Music’s Musical Inclusion programme. He is the author of Challenging Voices: Music Making with Children Excluded from School and has written on musical inclusion for the Oxford Handbook of Community Music.