Sooree Pillay, our Regional Producer: Midlands, dives into the findings from our year-long action research project with Leicestershire Virtual School.

Culture Sounds is exploring how music can contribute to creating a sense of belonging for unaccompanied young people seeking sanctuary in the UK.

As a passionate advocate of equity of access to creative orchestral music experiences, Orchestras Live has delivered projects with care-experienced children and young people with Derbyshire Virtual School since 2018.

Virtual schools were set up in 2014 as teams based in councils to specifically support the education and progress of children in care, and our journey with them has deepened our understanding of the challenges and barriers faced by care-experienced young people.

As all of our projects and programmes are bespoke: designed and delivered always in partnership, and we draw from a wide pool of professional orchestral workshop leaders experienced in working in a broad range of settings, we are constantly on the lookout for ways to improve our work and better meet the needs of the people we work with.

In Spring 2024, we were delighted when the opportunity arose to join Collaborate and Innovate, an action-research initiative led by Arts Connect and The Mighty Creatives exploring arts provision and partnership working with Virtual Schools who work with care-experienced children and young people across the Midlands.

Background: working with unaccompanied asylum-seeking children

Orchestras Live had started working in this area with Derbyshire Virtual School, Sinfonia Viva orchestra and Ava Hunt Theatre Company on a project called Destinies – it was one of the first project performances I attended when I joined the organisation. The performance and film screening I saw at Derby Theatre was a beautiful and touching evening of storytelling with the young participant voices clearly at the heart of the work.

Since that time, our focus has been on working with Unaccompanied Asylum-Seeking Children (UASC), exploring holistic arts provision with a focus on music-making, and realised through a series of workshops and residential sessions across Derbyshire – Culture Café Makes Music saw its last iteration in Spring 2024.

At the end of Culture Café Makes Music, we were happy to receive positive feedback from the participants and the Virtual School. However, we were left with a sense that we were just touching the surface both in understanding need and developing our offer so that music could have a greater positive impact for the young people we were working with.

Collaborate & Innovate: trauma-informed practice

Collaborate and Innovate gave participating arts organisations vital training in trauma-informed practice and specific insights into the barriers and challenges faced by care-experienced young people. It was the perfect moment for us to engage in this in-depth exploration, so that we could embed this in our own practice, building our own skills, those of music leaders and also Learning and Participation teams we work with. We learned much more about the work of the virtual schools, other agencies and parts of the council supporting children in care, and the specific effect that trauma has on the body, the brain and on mental health.

The training was followed by a series of action-research projects, creating opportunities for knowledge exchange, and a safe environment for the arts and virtual schools to build connections and develop approaches to creative collaborative work, to better understand each other, to find effective research methods to document impact and inform future practice across the Midlands and beyond. The University of Wolverhampton supported our process as we devised our research question.

Culture Sounds: A Place to Be(long)?

Our action-research project, Culture Sounds: A Place to Be(long)?, was delivered with Leicestershire Virtual School and Sinfonia Viva and it enabled us to engage different creative approaches to music-making with children in care. We wanted to explore the potential to create a sense of community and belonging among the young participants, something that had been identified as a key need in initial conversations with our colleagues from Leicestershire Virtual School.

Our research process had the aim of consulting with the young people themselves, professionals and adults involved in their care and music professionals with experience of working in this context. Thankful for mentoring and support from Arts Connect, The Mighty Creatives and the University of Wolverhampton for providing this space for us to be ambitious, we settled on three central questions:

• What challenges do Unaccompanied Asylum-Seeking Children face when engaging with arts projects and initiatives?​

• How can music build autonomy & agency so that UASC are more confident, independent, and equipped for adult life when they reach the point of leaving the care system?​

• What are the most effective ways to use music and other creative art forms as tools to build confidence and strengthen the participant's sense of identity within and outside of a project and/or care setting?

We knew that these were huge questions, and our quest would only begin to tackle them, but for us, keeping these overarching questions in our minds was central throughout the process – essentially, what we were trying to achieve had to be our guide, even if our progress would mark small steps towards these goals. Through these aims and our discussions, we kept coming back to the word “belonging” – most of all we wanted the participants to feel safe and that they belonged in this creative space, in whichever way they felt comfortable. We later learnt that in research terms, words like “belonging” are extremely complex to define, but important to discuss!

Reaching over-stretched teams working with these young people on a day-to-day basis and finding Music Leaders with relevant experience proved challenging, but once initial data gathering had been done, we felt one step closer to understanding the environment that Virtual Schools work in, and the specific challenges the young people in their care face.

In terms of co-design of the music workshops, whilst it is impossible to generalise as each young person brings a unique set of circumstances with them, we could identify common trends and barriers to engagement from our collective experience and with expert guidance from Music Leader, Jim Pinchen, whose practice is focused heavily on work with sanctuary-seeking children and young people.

Workshop insights

2025 took us on a journey consisting of gathering insights from professionals working on a day-to-day level with the young people, staff at the virtual school and arts practitioners. We delivered workshops with music leaders and participants, returning to discuss legacy opportunities with residential care workers and some of the young people who had taken part in the project. The research was shared in June when we were able to share our experiences as well as learn about the research journeys of other virtual schools and arts organisations in the Midlands.

Among the initial findings, we learned that most of the young people listen to music, also mostly on their own and that over 60% said that music influenced their mood. We learned that perceived barriers for Unaccompanied Asylum-Seeking Children (UASC) among adult professionals working with them included: financial cost, travel, lack of understanding about them; that they may only attend their own cultural events and tend to mix within their own community; and possibly these activities are something they are not used to accessing in their home country. 100% of respondents said yes when asked if UASC face specific challenges compared to other children in care and that these included:

• 80% experience language and or cultural barriers

• 50% understanding and navigating the UK system

• 50% mention trauma and/or stress

• challenges relating to feelings including isolation, lack of sleep

The positive impact of the music sessions was clear, and we saw music leaders Zangi and Raghad Haddad form positive connections with the group. All participants were engaged in using Djembe drums, trying new instruments, trying new costumes, and collaborating to create some music tracks together. We noted a clear sense of unity, and the participants seemed to enjoy sharing their own music as well as more social moments like eating together. Having worked for over nine months to prepare, it was also important to maintain a critical eye, and easy to get lost in the moment. To have all partners represented was crucial in our individual and collective responses to the sessions. Some adults had not been involved in the research process and were able to assess the impact of the activities in a more objective way, which was welcomed.

We would need a longer period of research time to explore our questions in more depth, and legacy conversations bode well for this development and the lives of these young people and the challenges they face are many and complex. We felt privileged that they so generously shared their time and energy with us and believe that the music-making sessions were of value to them. We will be sharing a full report of our findings in the coming months and with a chance to reflect on our journey so far. In the meantime, we are grateful to have had the chance to work in this way with Leicestershire Virtual School and learn more about their vital remit in looking after children who have entered and those about to leave the care system.