Our Mission
Sing Up encourages and supports singing and musical learning with children and young people so that they:
- Learn to sing well and enjoy singing
- Develop musical skills and understanding
- Experience the wider learning and developmental benefits that singing and music making provides
- Experience long-term benefits to their health and well-being
Our Purpose
We fulfil our mission by creating excellent, easy-to-use musical and learning resources and providing expert advice, which we make available in print and online.
Our intention is to inspire teachers (and others) to lead singing and teach music with confidence and skill, reduce their workload, give them quality resources that are easy to access, easy to use, engaging for pupils and really enjoyable to work with.
Our History
Created as a UK government funded programme to reinstate singing in primary schools in 2007, by 2012 Sing Up reached 98% of all primary schools in England. Sing Up has always been a campaign, a call-to-action, and has been built from the ground up, involving teachers, schools and music educators in its development and delivery from the outset.
Since funding ceased in 2012, the organisation has sustained itself almost entirely through earned income from schools’ Membership subscriptions. The continued investment and support from schools is a sign of the value they place on singing and on the work of Sing Up. Since 2012 over 60% of schools in the country have paid to continue to be Sing Up Members. Additionally, tens of thousands of individual teachers continue to be Sing Up Friends, giving them access to a selection of free songs and other resources. During the pandemic, Sing Up was fortunate to benefit from Culture Recovery Fund support from Arts Council England. This enabled us to continue supporting teachers and pupils when schools were closed and group singing was prohibited.
Over recent years Sing Up has expanded to include a range of resources for Secondary schools, a subscription for Choir Leaders and a complete primary music curriculum scheme of work with lessons for every week of the year from nursery through to Year 6 (age 11).
Sing Up now has Member schools all over the world, and continues to grow its Membership and the songs and resources available to them.
Our culture
Our culture is built upon foundations which were established in 2007. As a funded programme, Sing Up was a highly effective, collaborative, creative initiative, driven by a large team of committed and passionate people and a very wide network of collaborating organisation partners. The programme was delivered by a consortium of four organisations: Youth Music; Sage Gateshead; Faber Music and ad agency AMV. We have absorbed much of the culture of all four of those highly respected organisations and honed that combination into what we are today.
At our core, we're a team of mission-driven, creative collaborators and problem-solvers, most of us with a background in education and music; and we work with a much larger team of highly skilled freelance creatives and experts who share our commitment to our mission. We all have a strong commitment to continual learning - as individuals and as an organisation - as well as supporting learning in others.
Our commitment to Equity, Diversity & Inclusion
We are committed to educating ourselves, addressing the barriers to equality, equity and diversity, and creating an inclusive environment. This matters to us because if we fail to reflect the wider society in all we do, we risk becoming less relevant and too narrow in our focus. In the coming years we will be looking for new ways to cherish our existing customers and engage with communities we haven’t connected with before.
