About
The Richard Shephard Music Foundation (RSMF) works with schools across York, East Yorkshire, North Yorkshire and the Tees Valley. Through its music education programmes, delivered by Sing Education, it aims to increase both the number of primary-aged children receiving music lessons, and the length of time they spend each week experiencing music, at a critical stage in their development. The schools programme focuses largely on primary schools in disadvantaged or isolated communities.
RSMF wanted an independent picture of what the programme was achieving for children and asked me to design and deliver an evaluation of the programme. Working with their CEO, head of development and engagement, and Senior Admin and Events Officer, I developed a two-phase evaluation across six partner schools.
How I helped
My work involved:
- meetings with the team to gain an understanding of the organisation, its theory of change, and previous evaluation work
- designing an evaluation framework, tracking five outcomes: wellbeing, confidence, musical skills and knowledge, aspirations, and schools delivering more and better music education; which we then adapted for Phase Two to delve deeper into emergent themes, and gain material for stories.
- developing interview questions for both pupils and school staff
- making two trips to visit the schools, one in Autumn 2025, the other in Summer 2026, to carry out interviews with pupils and staff
- creating a more interactive paper/sticker likert-scale survey with pupils for Phase Two
- carrying out a thematic analysis of interview transcripts
- writing up individual pupil case studies, drawn from adult interviews
- producing interim and final reports with recommendations
Where we are now
The evaluation is now heading into its final phase: a single report bringing together the interviews, survey data and case studies from across both phases, alongside a knowledge-sharing session for RSMF’s wider stakeholders.