Creative activities, including music and drama have a huge impact on the mental health, self-confidence and self-expression of children and young people. Yet music education is being stripped back in state schools in England, with those with a high proportion of students receiving pupil premium worst hit. This inequality has deepened during the pandemic; one in ten schools currently offer no classroom music, even where this is a curricular requirement.
Our new strategy exhibits the future of CYO with our young people at the centre of everything we do. It has become clear to us that if we are to achieve our aims we need to address the whole life cycle from childhood to the point when young artists take their first step towards a career.
Stories in Song
4 – 10
To reach those who feel excluded from the arts, we need to start with younger children, working with and in primary schools. We want to inspire children for whom accessing the arts may be difficult and help to build their ownership of the arts.
We are beginning new CPD strands to build a culture of singing in schools and help spark the creativity of children. Our programme aims to empower teachers to use singing across the curriculum and to create a support network for teachers with an interest in singing.
The Company
11 – 18
Our young people have great ideas and an excellent understanding of what works for them. We want to involve them more deeply in every step of the CYO process, empowering them to inform CYO’s future as we build more creative activities into our performance programme.
We will continue to mount fully-staged productions for 11 – 18 year olds, engaging them in the creation of the operas and all performance and technical elements of running a show, as well as in future developments.
CYO Young Artists
19 – 30
We aim to support those who are taking their first steps into the world of professional performing arts, providing affordable and practical help in an increasingly competitive and expensive world. We aim particularly to address areas which we feel are currently under-represented in existing programmes.
This programme will be aimed at singers, primarily at pre-Conservatoire level, as well as student and newly graduated designers, stage managers and technicians.
In order to achieve our ambitions we are moving away from a project-to-project funding basis and we are seeking more sustainable funding to develop true resilience as an arts organisation. For more information on how you can support these new developments, please contact us.
You can explore our strategy in detail in our Business Plan for 2022 – 2025
Cambridge Youth Opera 
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