Evaluating the Impact of RNCM Children’s Opera on Primary School Pupils

This project aims to understand how the RNCM’s flagship creative engagement project impacts on the confidence and social inclusion attitudes of primary school children.

The RNCM Children’s Opera is a multi-award-winning project that runs annually as part of the RNCM Engage initiative.

The project involves around 120 local primary school children designing, practicing and performing a new opera in February each year, facilitated by the RNCM Creative Engagement team. composer Kate Pearson and RNCM students. Since its debut in 2009, over 2000 young people have taken part in the project – performing in the RNCM Theatre to an audience of family and friends, and the general public.

Anecdotally, we know that this experience has huge benefits for the children involved, who often speak very positively of the experience. We also know anecdotally from feedback from schools and parents that this experience can have a significant perceived impact on the children – parents often feedback on their surprise that their child had the confidence to perform in such a way, and that they exhibit self esteem that they did not think that the children had.

This project sought to acquire more robust evidence about the value of the Children’s Opera to children, and the impact on children’s reports of their involvement with music, singing and other factors such as confidence.

All primary school children who took part in the Children’s Opera in February 2024 were invited to take part, and were asked to fill in a survey developed from the Sing Up questionnaire (Welch at al., 2014), which has been used in multiple research studies to measure children’s attitudes towards performance, confidence in performing, and attitudes to social inclusion. Children (in primary school years 4 and 5) completed the questionnaire before and after taking part in the RNCM Children’s Opera (following the project being granted ethical approval, and consent being obtained by parents), and responses were analysed using a pre- and post-test paradigm.

Findings are currently being prepared for publication.