Achievements and performance

The Trust’s sixth year of operation was planned as its penultimate one (although it has subsequently been decided that the formal winding up will take place slightly later, a few months into its eighth year). Consequently, our energies were directed to deciding how best to use the remaining funds at our disposal, and to ensuring that our grant holders were aware that they could not expect funding to continue much longer. These terminal activities did not however prevent us from starting a new and very promising project with Redbridge Music Service, as explained below.

Our long and highly successful association with the Guildhall School of Music &Drama (GSMD) came to an end, but we are delighted to report that the associated project has now been permanently established with full funding from GSMD. For five years, Luke Crookes, with funding from the Trust, has been taking groups of GSMD students to the children’s and old people’s wards of Whipps Cross hospital in North London, and later to Haven House children’s hospice, to conduct ‘musical experiences’. It is a great tribute to Luke’s remarkable abilities as a musical facilitator that this now forms a permanent and official part of GSMD’s ‘Community Music’ programme, but we are also proud that this arose from a Trust initiative, and that the programme was developed by Luke working closely with the Trustees. We consider that this is one of the Trust’s most significant achievements. We wish Luke and his colleagues at the Guildhall every success with the future of the project.

We made our last grant in Haringey for the whole class string teaching programme at Stroud Green Primary school. In previous years, we have given grants to Redbridge Music Service for a brass teaching programme in a primary school, principally to buy instruments. However, Mossford Green Primary school now has sufficient cornets for its needs and in close association with Eric Forder of the Redbridge Music Service, and Karen MacKenzie of ColourStrings, we have helped to fund a ColourStrings for the first year classes of a primary school. The first year of the programme is intended to develop basic musical skills; the intention is to extend this to start instrumental skills in the second year. All four classes of the year 1 intake attend the sessions. The programme is being run at a brand new primary school, and the headteacher and her staff not only enthusiastically supported the programme while it was being developed, but after its first year, are continuing to do so. Better still, the Music Service has committed two of its staff part time to the programme, which includes a training element both for them and for the non-specialist staff at the school.

We gave our final grant to the Kaos Signing Choir for Deaf & Hearing Children, which under its remarkable directors Suzy Davies and Ali Wood enthuse choirs which include a large proportion of children with hearing difficulties. Other final grants were to the composer David Stoll for projects for children with special needs and the Nonesuch Orchestra, which enthuses children in schools all over London. We continued to pay for individual music lessons for about a dozen children who would otherwise find it difficult to afford them, and also supported Rhythmically Speaking, a well established group which conducts percussion based music sessions in schools, and we will continue that support next year.

We believe the only major risk we face is that one of our grant holders is not effective in using the grant to further our objectives. The Trustees believe that our close vetting of projects, the widespread range of projects supported and our good contacts with grant holders minimises this risk.

The next page lists our grant holders during the year, and shows the amounts of the grants made.

KAOS!