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SING! Community outreach programme

Hello and welcome to Sheffield Cathedral’s Sing! project.

We run in conjunction with the Sheffield Music Hub and the University of Sheffield’s Music Department. The project aims to bring singing back into the heart of every primary school child’s life, through a mixture of exciting workshops and performances. We believe that singing has power to change lives and help to build stronger communities.

Our scheme at Sheffield has several different strands all geared towards helping children in Sheffield discover their voices and the joys of quality singing and we hope that the experiences will stay with them for the rest of their lives.

If you would like your school to be a part of Sing!, just contact Nick Cox via

School Visits

Our main day to day work involves delivering singing sessions in schools, these are led by our resident animateurs. An animateur aims to transform a classroom of unlikely lads and lasses into a chorus of angels exuding confidence, tunefulness and enjoyment in abundance. At the heart of our project is the belief that children need singing every day. In doing these sessions, we hope to pass on expertise to the teaching staff at school so that they can take what we do further and introduce a daily singing routine - even if it’s just singing the register for 2 minutes in the morning.

We can offer your school sessions for half a term, a whole term or a whole year where one of our animateurs will come in and spend half an hour to an hour with a class and get them up and singing and having fun. Also, we love nothing better than getting a class to sing to other children so assembly performances are a must!

The animateurs are also available for vocal coaching of already established singing groups in school, whether for one or two sessions or for a whole year. As well as this, they can help out with vocal coaching in school productions if you need to add that extra shine to a performance!

At present, we are working with: Bethany, Byron Wood, Lower Meadow, Lowfield, Valley Park, Sharrow, Prince Edwards, Norton Free, Phillimore, St Joseph’s RC, Wharncliffe Side Malin Bridge and Wybourne.

Outreach Concerts

At the end of every term, we put on a outreach concert here at the cathedral. These are usually on a Saturday morning. Three or four of the schools with which we work come to the cathedral, having spent the term learning the repertoire, and spend a morning filling the historic space with their voices, singing to invariably packed houses. We have had anywhere up to 150 children singing at once suring these events.

In the past, performances have included - amongst many other things - singing some Queen for the actual Queen, a performance of Beatles songs (A Hard Days Sing), a semi-staged performance of Joseph and His Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat, and providing a massed choir at City Hall as part of Sheffield Music Service’s Annual Gala Concert. One of our most recent performance was a semi-staged performance of Captain Noah and his Floating Zoo in June 2012. This was accompanied by musicians from Sheffield Music Academy who also put on an incredible performance of Saint-Sains Carnival of the Animals (with interspersed poetry by the children) in the first half.

Nothing beats the sound of scores of children singing together as one and watching mutual excitement and appreciation spread across the faces of performers and audience alike. You can be sure of a few surprises in every concert as the musicians of the cathedral don their entertainment hats!

Sheffield Cathedral Young Voices

Sheffield Cathedral Young Voices is a group of young singers aged between 7 and 12 who meet at the Cathedral every Saturday morning during term-time from 11am to 12pm. The group gets expert vocal tuition from Sheffield Cathedral’s experienced animateurs.

All of the repertoire is secular (we never perform cathedral ‘services’ as such) and we put on at least one performance a term. Past performances have included Sheffield City Hall, the Octagon centre at Sheffield University, Opera North in Leeds, and in April 2012, we sang at the Royal Albert Hall in London as part of the National Youth Choirs of Great Britain Worldsong event.

We are always looking for new members so if you think that your child(ren) may be interested, let us know! Please contact Nick Cox

Training Scheme

We also run a Training Scheme in conjunction with the University of Sheffield’s Music Department. Trainees, be they students or teachers, can come and shadow an animateur on school visits and share ideas and techniques for the introduction and development of singing for primary school aged children. It is our hope, that some of these trainees will go on to become animateurs on the scheme. As more and more people get the skills to visit schools and work with children, we can offer more and more schools the chance to develop their singing.

We hope you’ve enjoyed reading about the Sing! project. We are very proud of what we have achieved over the last five years and we hope to keep delivering quality singing in schools around Sheffield for years to come.