In this section

The power of safe spaces

Case Study: Breathe Academy Choice, agency and identity

Songwriting as a gateway

Case Study: Lewisham Music – The ‘Young Sessions’ Takeover

Body and breath

Relationships and belonging

The magic of group singing

Which works better, singing groups or 121 activity?

Time, rhythm and flow

The power of safe spaces

Without safety, nothing else works. And for young people with mental health challenges, relationships are critical – connection and trust allow both the musical and more therapeutic benefits to flow.

In 2024 the Sing Up Foundation commissioned Blue Cabin to create a guide to Safe Spaces. The guide identified Six Dimensions of Safety:

Many young people who are struggling find themselves confronted with an array of interventions and assessment conversations. These can be challenging and off-putting, so while singing might be an effective intervention, it’s important that the singing space feels different from other environments where young people are likely to feel ‘assessed’.

It’s also important to acknowledge that singing isn’t the right intervention for every child or young person. For some, it may not resonate; for others, the vulnerability involved may be too much, at least initially. Being honest about this from the outset helps us avoid overclaiming, and helps practitioners make good judgments about who might benefit.

All this reflects how singing for mental health needs to diverge from standard attainment-based educational practices. Singing in this context will almost never be formally assessed, unless by the young person’s own choice, and technical achievement, whilst a valuable feature, isn’t likely to be the main goal – music as an agent of positive change is the goal. For a life impacted by feelings of difference and failure, music offers a space where ‘mistakes’

don’t need to exist, or at least not in a negative sense, and where everything is part of a creative process.

Dr Dave Camlin describes a place of ‘safe danger’, where participants can control how, and how much, they commit emotionally, choosing to pull back without affecting the ‘group sound’.

Safe Spaces Guide

Explore our trauma-informed and practical framework to support you in your work.

Download now

Case Study: Breathe Academy

Breathe Academy works with young people using beatboxing and vocal creativity to support mental health and identity. Their films capture what it means for young people to find a creative community where they belong.

SK Shlomo is an international non-binary beatbox star, former World Looping Champion, and mental health ambassador. Despite a career performing at Glastonbury and collaborating with global artists, Shlomo’s journey was shadowed by undiagnosed ADHD and a life-threatening mental health crisis. Their recovery sparked a fundamental shift in their artistic practice: moving away from the pressure of ‘being the best’ towards using music as a tool for survival, identity, and connection.

This ethos is the heartbeat of Breathe Academy, a project to support young people’s wellbeing, championed by the Sing Up Foundation and funded by Youth Music and Arts Council England. Moving away from traditional, notation-based music education, Shlomo uses beatboxing and live looping to create accessible, non-judgemental spaces. As Shlomo notes in Sing Up Foundation’s Inspiring Voices podcast, beatboxing is “disarmingly easy”; it bypasses the potential vulnerability of melodic singing to offer immediate agency and control – a vital anchor for young people navigating anxiety or trauma.

To capture the specific impact of this approach, Sing Up Foundation commissioned Beatboxing, Identity, and Mental Health, a suite of three films profiling Shlomo’s one-to-one

work with young creators:

Shlomo works with Blessing to build confidence in creating vocal loops. The session focuses on using these beats not just as music, but as a rhythmic foundation to key into and elevate her existing skills in poetry and spoken word.

This film highlights the complex relationship between voice and gender identity. Shlomo collaborates with Ryan to produce a cover of a track that Ryan deeply relates to, using the safety of the studio to explore a voice that feels authentic to who they are.

Shlomo helps Rayanna write and record

an original song from scratch. The process

demonstrates how creative vocal work can

serve as a mechanism for processing complex

emotions, revealing the unique power of

songwriting to support mental health.

The collaboration highlights that, in this context, technical mastery is secondary to expression, while the space, the tools and the support are excellent, and yield high-quality outcomes. By offering young people a platform to tell their own stories, the work validates identities and transforms a sense of isolation into a powerful shared community.

Listen: SK Shlomo on beatboxing and Breathe

Beatbox artist SK Shlomo shares how beatboxing can be an easy way into vocal work, and talks honestly about the personal journey, through identity and mental health, that led to their project, Breathe.

-- Listen · Watch --

We should be open about the risks of working with vulnerable people in a semi-therapeutic context, where poorly delivered singing activities may cause more harm than benefit. For example, negative experiences can deepen disconnection by confirming beliefs about not belonging, and evangelical enthusiasm or ‘cliquiness’ around singing can itself exclude. So the invitation to use your voice can feel meaningless or even threatening if previous experiences of speaking up led to punishment, dismissal, or harm.

Here we find a research gap – we don’t yet have systematic studies which substantively break down how and when singing creates connection or disconnection in this context.

Creating safe spaces is practically and emotionally demanding work, and we have a duty to our workforce and young people to put in place the right levels of support on multiple levels – from ensuring physical spaces are safe and well set up, to preparing young people for activity, to looking after the wellbeing of practitioners. In a challenging funding environment with over-stretched institutions it can be easy to overlook, or shortcut, safety and support, but it should be non-negotiable.

Choice, agency and identity

Self-Determination Theory (Deci & Ryan 19856) proposes that humans have three basic psychological needs – autonomy, competence, and relatedness – and that wellbeing flourishes when these are met. Mental health challenges often involve a loss of agency – being ‘done to’ rather than ‘doing’. Singing offers control over what young people say and how, and this becomes particularly important for populations with limited autonomy, such as care experienced and displaced young people, and those in secure settings.

For children spending extended periods in hospital, where illness itself creates additional mental health pressures, this loss of agency can be acute:

The voice can contribute to a sense of self and self-worth. Professor Graham Welch’s research findings ‘support the hypothesis that identity as a singer is positively correlated with psychological well-being’. For young people with complex histories, singing helps them recognise that their voices can be heard, sometimes for the first time.

But criticism of singing can also feel like criticism of self. During the early days of Sing Up as the Government’s National Singing Programme (2007-11), one of the most cited issues for teachers’ fears around singing were having been told that they couldn’t sing when they were younger, the scars of which often remained throughout their lives.

For some young people, loss of agency isn’t only a symptom of mental ill-health – it’s a product of lived experience.

Given that intersecting marginalised identities compound mental health risks (research consistently shows that children facing multiple forms of disadvantage or discrimination experience higher rates of anxiety, depression, and emotional distress), those most in need of support are likely to be navigating complex issues. For these young people, the singing space must do more than offer choice – it must actively rebuild the expectation that their voice matters. This is why practitioner skill is so critical: agency cannot be assumed, it must be carefully, consistently demonstrated through action.

Yet what makes singing so powerful in this context is precisely its creativeness and connection to identity. When done well, it can be genuinely transformative for young people. But what does that look like in practice?

Here are some examples:

Songwriting as a gateway

Young people can express through songwriting what they may struggle to say aloud. The musical frame provides distance and safety, enabling reflection on identity, the processing of trauma, and the articulation of personal truth. While care is needed to ensure songwriting does not re-traumatise participants, evidence suggests that when safely facilitated it allows individuals to externalise painful experiences within a ‘safe container’, making trauma processing more manageable and supporting the reconstruction of a positive identity.

Sharing and performing original songs or other vocal creations allows young people to engage in what researchers call ‘identity claiming’ – being seen as a creator, an artist, someone with something to say, rather than a problem to be fixed.

Cultural relevance is more than surface representation – it’s reflected in repertoire, styles, language and understanding. For displaced young people, the music space may be the only place where their culture is valued. For others, culturally resonant genres like hip hop, grime or drill offer authentic means of expression, although these come with complexity. Some content may feel too negative for certain settings; traditional choral structures may exclude trans and non-binary young people; some repertoire may be forbidden for religious reasons.

The richness of music provides great opportunity, but practitioners must be equipped with cultural competence, awareness of power dynamics, and humility about knowledge gaps. When including repertoire from unfamiliar cultures, this means ensuring proper translations, context, and expertise – and being alert to cultural appropriation. It also means being authentic yourself: vulnerable young people quickly sense when someone is putting on a persona. We can’t know all music – but we can learn, and we can ask.

There is a constantly moving sweet spot between practitioner direction and participant choice. Understanding where and how to lead – and where and how to step back – is at the heart of successful practice in this context.

Case Study: Lewisham Music – The ‘Young Sessions’ Takeover

Lewisham Music has established itself as a vital creative hub in South East London, empowering young people not just as musicians but as content creators. This commitment to youth voice was pioneered through their own podcast series, Front Line Young Minds, produced entirely by young people to explore the intersection of music and mental health.

Building on this, participants from the Rap & Lyricism Collective and Lewisham Vocal Collective (LVC) recently took over Sing Up Foundation’s Inspiring Voices podcast. Hosted by young producer Toni-Ann Gurdon, the discussions moved beyond the output of music to explore the internal process of making it.

The young artists articulated how the creative environment itself functions as a tool for regulation and focus:

• Jaden described the studio as a unique place of “peace” where he can finally focus, contrasting it with the difficulty of finding that headspace elsewhere.

• Ziggy highlighted the importance of group dynamics, describing the collective as a “Incredibles-style” team where individual superpowers combine, allowing them to shift between deep focus and “vibing” together.

• Marlee noted the specific validation of the “vocalist mindset” – a shared understanding of the instrument that she couldn’t find in traditional music classrooms.

For others, the focus was on music as a physiological and emotional release. Mimi Mxnroe noted that singing “releases endorphins that the gymnasium cannot give you”. LifeofKwaze shared how his track My Room’s Kinda Messy became a metaphor for his own mind state, allowing him to externalise internal chaos.

The takeover culminated in a performance of Mirrors on Windows by H-Jay. This spoken word piece powerfully demonstrated how creative practice allows young people to reframe trauma, including the poignant line: “Suicide ain’t a full stop. That’s just a comma for someone else to carry on your sentence”.

Listen: Young Sessions with Lewisham Music

Episode 1 — Finding Your Flow

Young artists on how creativity helps them focus, settle and find their flow.

-- Listen · Watch --

Episode 2 — Music As Medicine

Young artists on music as release: writing as a way to put difficult feelings somewhere and creative practice as a way to reframe hard experiences.

-- Listen · Watch --

Body and breath

The human body-mind is an integrated system, connecting the nervous, endocrine and immune systems, so the process of singing will engage respiratory, neurological, limbic and emotional functions in, as it were, ‘harmony’.

Prolonged exhalation taps into the parasympathetic nervous system by toning the vagal nerve. The parasympathetic system exercises the ‘rest and digest’ elements of life – the opposite of ‘fight or flight’, which means that singing has a potentially unique power either to down-regulate or up-regulate as needed.

For young people in dysregulated states – whether hyperarousal (anxious, agitated, overwhelmed) or hypoarousal (shut down, numb, withdrawn) – singing can help, and both the breathing which underpins singing, and breathing exercises used alongside it, are a great tool to help them self-regulate.

The voice is a powerful ‘first aid kit’ that we carry around with us, and of course it requires no equipment, appointment, or cost. It can help us to:

• Self-soothe

• Manage anxiety

• Shift from a state of unhealthy rumination

The aerobic benefits of voice work include:

• Enhanced oxygen intake

• Tissue health

• Improvements to cognitive function

This makes singing, and exercising of the voice, a life skill, not just a session activity. But there are benefits in both, which is what makes singing such a powerful tool for wellbeing – it goes right to the core of who we are and how our body functions. We sing – and always have done – for a reason.

Physiological benefits of singing are further demonstrated through the proven neurochemical modulations which singing can trigger:

Relationships and belonging

Hala Jaber, who works with displaced children, describes a similar experience: “Knowing that your voice within that group is important... a non-judgemental, safe area where the child can sing.”

Singing is a social glue. Humans are inherently social, and our music making is largely interactive and participatory, so singing is associated with increased perceived social connectedness and positive feelings.

For vulnerable young people the practitioner relationship can be the essential gateway – trust enables risk-taking, to sing, to express, to be vulnerable. For this relationship to be successful, the practitioner needs to demonstrate a range of capabilities, including emotional maturity, empathy, active listening, authenticity and non-judgement. As trainer and practitioner Mark Bick suggests, “being real” helps make a connection to young people who may have “powerful ‘BS’ detectors”.

There’s also a complex power dynamic. A young person who may have felt repeatedly ‘done to’ or not having felt settled and safe, may not respond well to a practitioner who assumes a position of perceived power, whereas a sharing of power, or empowerment, of young people in this context, often yields the best results.

The humanity of singing together is what drives this work. Dr Dave Camlin’s research and practice have identified three values that can be materialised through group singing:

The magic of group singing

There’s something uniquely powerful about singing together in a group. This is something humans have done throughout history, across every culture, and it seems we’re biologically wired for it.

When we sing together, we’re doing something no other species can do: vibrating our vocal folds at the same frequencies, synchronising our breathing, even aligning our heartbeats. Research shows that collective singing stimulates brain areas related to empathy, triggering the release of oxytocin (the bonding hormone) and dopamine (associated with reward and pleasure). The neurological synchrony is real and measurable.

But practitioners describe something beyond the science. Dr Dave Camlin’s research has consistently identified what the literature calls ‘magic moments’ – experiences where time seems to stand still. One participant in his research described it beautifully: “I could feel my precious sense of self drifting away on a wave of harmony.” Those who have been in a group singing situation will likely know the feeling – making an amazing sound together that couldn’t happen alone, experiencing goosebumps, even a sense that this is what it means to be human.

Conductor David Lawrence, who works with choirs from small ensembles to arena-scale Young Voices concerts, believes the way to get a great sound is to encourage every singer to take 100% responsibility. “If you stand there and believe that your voice counts, then you get a really great sound. And not only is it wonderful to listen to, but it’s much more wonderful to take part in when you know your voice counts.” This philosophy – that singing in a choir is about assuming responsibility, not hiding in the crowd – transforms the experience into something empowering. For teenagers especially, he observes, choir offers “a weekly opportunity to get outside yourself” at a time when the world often shrinks and becomes very internal.

Which works better, singing groups or 121 activity?

Both can be effective.

Feeling a sense of belonging can be a powerful step for young people towards better mental health. Where singing is a performance of relationships as much as, or more than, musical performance, we can establish singing as a way to build social cohesion through belonging.

It’s worth remembering that connection through singing can sometimes fail. Perceived barriers to joining groups, fragile trust broken through unintended slip-ups, and moments that confirm negative beliefs can deepen disconnection for vulnerable young people. Understanding what success looks like for different individuals, and how to achieve it, can provide the right framework for mitigating failures. We explore what this means for practitioner skills and development in Section 5 (What does the workforce need?).

Time, rhythm and flow

Singing is inherently ‘temporal’ – it unfolds in time and demands attention in the moment, and unlike many activities, requires simultaneous listening, producing and adjusting. So it’s hard to be elsewhere mentally. And interestingly, this present-moment quality of singing can work in spheres which can be both opposing and connective:

• Relief: for young people overwhelmed by rumination or intrusive thoughts, the focus on singing can offer respite – a break from the mental noise

• Processing: for those ready to face difficult feelings, singing can provide a safe container to explore and express emotions

Singing can offer both an escape from difficult feelings but also a way into them.

And this is perhaps the most important aspect of working in this context – singing to tackle overtly the challenges young people have or are currently experiencing, as well providing an escape. Balancing and navigating this, both through planning and in the moment, is at the heart of skilled practice when working with vulnerable young people.

Regularity and routine are also worth considering. For young people whose lives are chaotic or unpredictable, regular sessions and musical spaces can provide invaluable anchor points. In the activity itself, familiar routines such as warm-ups, check-ins, check-outs and setting of expectations create predictability and safety, which may be particularly valuable for neurodivergent, displaced and care experienced young people.

There is a need for structural balance too – structure provides safety, but flexibility allows responsiveness to what’s happening in the room. A skilled practitioner will know when to stick to the plan and when or how much to depart from it. The potential immediate benefits from this work are well evidenced – mood lift, stress reduction and connection. Longer-term impact is harder to demonstrate and requires sustained engagement and study over time. What are the causal links to sustained clinical improvement (e.g. anxiety/depression diagnoses), what ‘dosage’, how often, for how long, to create lasting change? We want to move research beyond smaller interventions to learning what works over time and at scale, including how groups of schools might configure their singing offer to support mental health.

Autism-friendly singing, in practice

The ideas about routine and pred

ictability here come alive in practice.

See how one autistic youth choir approaches singing, with autism-friendly top tips and a checklist you can adapt for your own setting.

Read the case study

Top tips and checklist