Delivery Partner Spotlight: Do The Mic Thing

Do The Mic Thing is a mobile mental health music production program that delivers 1-to-1 and group work sessions of songwriting, recording and music production with young people, addressing their social emotional needs and mental health through music.

Do The Mic Thing has worked with AllChild since 2023 via a youth service provision, where we were tasked with delivering our mental health music programme to a group of primary school students. After the success of that session, we established a partnership to work in schools delivering our programme to referred students with social and emotional needs that would benefit from additional support.

Channelling creative expression to address anxieties

We use music to help young people express their thoughts and feelings and as a vehicle to discuss any issues they are having. The end result is a finished recorded song that reflects their life and journey, which provides a better understanding of the issues they are experiencing, teaches new skills and boosts their confidence.

Our partnership with AllChild has helped us to reach more young people in need of social and emotional support. AllChild has been an endorsement to this, helping the programme become known across West London as a positive resource to schools, working together with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND), safeguarding and behavioural teams and across youth settings and provisions. Students now identify Do The Mic Thing as a space to unravel, check in and seek help and support to their problems.

Engagement is integral to the programme’s development. As a conduit to engagement, music is used as a tool for conversation and to delve into the mental health of the music we listen to and the music we make and create in collaboration. We write and review song lyrics, asking what the lyrics mean to a young person, creating a connection and looking at its effects on them. Most young people like some genre of music and can identify music or a soundtrack that they feel relates to their lived experiences.

Growing confidence and improving academic performance

The music mentoring programme is for a whole school term, and the attendance level is high. Students rarely miss a music mentoring session and with each session it is easy to see the students’ confidence grow. Most arrive with little experience of making music and songwriting but leave with an accomplished finished song and recording that they are proud of.

Each week I am able to monitor the young people’s behaviour and discuss it with them. Over the term there are vast improvements in academic goals, such as attendance and punctuality, but also creative expression. We focus on confidence, courage, commitment, consistency and completion with each student.

We see ourselves in schools as a permanent and important mental health music mentoring programme, supporting safeguarding, SEND and behavioural teams, students, and parents as part of plans to support student engagement at school and emotional regulation.