EFDSS Education Programmes:
Autumn 2008

Take 6
Hundreds of folk songs and tunes, representing a huge swathe of English traditional music heritage, are on their way back to the communities that gave birth to them.

Funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF), Take 6 is an 18-month archival, educational and community project which will be completed in August 2009. Through Take 6 EFDSS is archiving and conserving six unique manuscript collections and making them more widely accessible to the public, through digitising and putting the collections on line. (For more details on the archiving aspect of the project please contact the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library.

Four of the six collections are:

• the Janet Blunt Collection, Oxfordshire;
• the George Butterworth Collection: southern England and Yorkshire;
• the Francis Collinson Collection, from the southern counties of England and;
• the Hammond Collection, mainly from Dorset.

The other two collections are being used as the source material for projects in primary schools and communities in Hampshire and Lancashire where the songs were originally noted, namely:

• the George Gardiner Collection of over 1600 folk songs collected mainly in Hampshire in the period 1905 to 1909 and;
• the Anne G. Gilchrist Collection of 214 folk songs plus children's singing games, Lancashire Morris tunes, songs from customs, sea shanties, carols and street cries, all collected from the 1890s to the 1920s, mainly in Lancashire.

This is EFDSS Education's first national education project springing from the Society's unrivalled archival collections.
Folk Song and Singing Games Projects are being developed and implemented in eight primary schools. "Folk Song Alive" showcase events are taking place in each school to share the children's learning and creative work with the wider school community.

Projects encompass singing, song writing, dance, playground singing games and rhymes. They are specifically designed to support several areas of the curriculum such as music, literacy, history, PE / dance, PHSE & Citizenship and to bring the songs to life for young people in a way that is fresh, contemporary and relevant.

Learning resources are being developed with all participating schools investigating and demonstrating how these heritage materials can be best used to support the curriculum and other key contemporary educational concerns. These resources will be made available online in summer 2009.

The complementary community-based programme is being developed in partnership with regional folk agencies and other local bodies, increasing community access to the Take 6 collections by touring display stands in community locations in Hampshire, Lancashire and Southwark and at major folk and community festivals.

Folk arts practitioners involved in Take 6 this autumn are:
• Pete Coe
• Carolyn Robson
•'Doc' Rowe
• Paul Sartin
• Roger Watson

Earlier in 2008 EFDSS Education successfully piloted the use of the materials in London, in conjunction with Redriff Primary School in Southwark which has a history of promoting singing games – an annual festival there in the 1960s led to an album of recordings on the prestigious Topic Records label. Work at the school was multi-layered encompassing a "Singing Games" project with all classes, from Reception to Year 6, and a complementary oral history and reminiscence project with local older people.



The project concluded with a wonderful afternoon 'sharing' event in the school playground where all children took part in performing past and present playground singing and clapping games, some children performing Maypole dances, and ending with a mini ceilidh for all children, staff, parents and visitors to the rousing music of the folk band Faustus.