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SING! Community outreach programme

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

We run in conjunction with Sheffield Music Service, the University of Sheffield’s Music Department and Sing Up, the Government’s national singing program for primary school aged children. It’s a programme aimed at bringing singing back into the heart of every primary school child’s life. 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 can transform a classroom of unlikely lads and lasses into a chorus of angels exuding confidence, tunefulness and enjoyment in abundance. 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! 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!

At present, we are working with: Bethany, Byron Wood, Limpsfield, Lower Meadow, Lowfield, Netherthorpe, Norton Free, Phillimore, St Catherine’s RC, St Joseph’s RC, Springfield and Wybourne.

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!

Outreach Concerts

Once a term, we put on an Outreach Concert at the Cathedral. Each one has its own musical theme (which has so far been as diverse as musicals and the Beatles) and we have had anywhere up to 150 children filling the Cathedral’s historic space with their voices in front of packed houses. 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 11 who meet at the Cathedral every Saturday morning during term-time from 11am to 12pm to just sing together and have fun. The music is entirely secular and they perform at each of the Outreach Concerts through the year. The group gets expert vocal tuition from Sheffield Cathedral’s experienced animateurs. Most importantly, the group is open to anyone and everyone aged 7 to 11 and is completely free to attend! It is possible to join at any time, not just at the start of a term or a school year. All we ask for is commitment, enthusiasm and punctuality!

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 three years and we hope to keep delivering quality singing in schools around Sheffield for years to come.