Why the power of song is being promoted in schools

Imagine something that's free, has no negative side-effects, is great for team-building, and does wonders for self-esteem, concentration, morale and behaviour. Then imagine the effect if every schoolchild were to get a daily dose of it.

Well, some already do, and many more soon will, if Howard Goodall gets his way. The exuberant composer, well known for his television documentaries How Music Works and Big Bangs, was this year appointed "singing ambassador" by the Government, and is now heading up a campaign to rekindle singing in schools.

There is no doubt that it is a brilliant appointment. Goodall is a natural enthusiast and terrific communicator. With his curly hair and choirboy good looks, not to mention his Tiggerish bounce, and his passion for music, he must seem like a blast of inspiration to any dispirited music teacher or turned-off schoolchild. If anyone is going to get today's pupils singing again, he is surely the one.

And Goodall is already vigorously putting himself about, promoting the joys and rewards of singing. Yet the really hard work of getting singing going in schools, as he is keen to point out, will still be done by those who have long grafted to get music moving in the classroom. And his involvement with music in education by no means started with this latest appointment.

For 18 months before taking this job, Goodall was involved in developing the singing strand of the Music Manifesto, a general push to promote music in schools. And for years, he has been a rousing compère of the Schools Proms, held annually at the Albert Hall.

Because of all this, it is perhaps not surprising that, when he is asked, yet again, why schools should bother to boost their singing, there is the sound of buttons being pushed and familiar phrases being wheeled out.

"Well, the thing about singing," Goodall says, sitting at the kitchen table in the Chelsea flat that he uses as his working base, "is that it's non-competitive, involves no losers, and is thoroughly enjoyable – and how many other things do you know that are like that? It also enhances memory and performance, and it has huge power in terms of behaviour. There aren't many solutions to bad behaviour, in terms of cohering large groups of people, but singing is something that has that power."

And, as he points out, singing is as natural as laughing. So, to expect thousands of pupils to get through a week at school without doing it even once "just can't be right – it's like saying you're not allowed to smile for a week!".

Goodall continues: "Singing is most powerful when it is in the culture of the school, rather than just 10 minutes at the start of the day, so part of what we have to do is to get heads enthusiastic in the first place. They have to see the effects it has on behaviour and morale, and that's not always easy when they are so harassed and busy.

"Some of the best people to tell them are other heads. They are far more powerful than me. For instance, there can be two ways of looking at how you go about tackling special measures. You can strip the school down to its bare essentials, and devote yourself to the core of maths, English and behaviour. Or you can go a different way. I've seen schools come out of special measures by using music to improve memory, concentration and behaviour."

This new push for singing is being centred on primary schools, and what is most important, says Goodall, is not to train more specialist teachers, but to train the general classroom ones to feel that they can teach singing with confidence.

What is also needed is good songs for children to sing, "so we're going to put together a song resource for all schools". In the past, he says, children have been forced to sing songs that don't work on several counts. Firstly, children can't always sing the same songs as adults – their voices don't yet have the range. Secondly, our national song stock seems to be stuck in our imperial past. "There are a lot of things about our national life that are no longer appealing to today's young people, and singing songs about Napoleon being defeated is one of them. This is a unique problem in England. It's not something that seems to have occurred to the Scots or Welsh, or, indeed, to most other nations."

Goodall believes that, while most children will quite rightly resist being forced to warble, "On yonder hill there stands a creature...", they are more than willing to embrace all kinds of other musical traditions. So the new national song book will draw from a very wide range of sources.

However, he will not be directly involved in this or any of the other planned developments, such as building links between choir schools and other schools. Specialist music organisations and others will be bidding to deliver the work. His job is strictly to keep the campaign in the public eye, which he does with relentless positivity and calculated optimism. After all, as he once memorably pointed out, schoolboys don't go around the playground recruiting for their bands by saying, "Do you want to be in my band? It's rubbish".

So, he is keen to emphasise how school-music services are now bouncing back, after a bad dip at the end of the last century, and that there are already plenty of brilliant singing programmes in existence. There's Manchester's Music Service Singing Schools Initiative, for instance, which now reaches almost all primary schools in the city; as well as all the good work being done at the Sage, in Gateshead, to involve boys and families in music, and to promote school singing.

So, does he truly believe that, in our secular age, singing can play the same part in children's lives as it did in the hymn-singing past? Yes, he truly does. For one thing, he says, at least three ministers – Alan Johnson, David Lammy and Andrew Adonis – have musical connections and are behind the aims of the campaign. For another, there's the £10m that's been earmarked to help it happen.

"What we're doing is slightly different from the Jamie Oliver thing with school dinners. We're not saying that what's in place isn't good. We're saying that what's done in some places is good, and we want every school to enjoy that level of training and resources."

The comparison is telling. Goodall is, after all, very much a television person. Although a prolific composer, it is his television and film scores he's best known for – with top of the list, by far, the theme to Blackadder. His documentaries are carried along by his own verve and enthusiasm as a performer, and he's also something of a celebrity, counting other celebrities such as Richard Curtis and Rowan Atkinson among his best mates.

So, is there a "Howard's School Singing" documentary already in the pipeline? He can't really answer that, he says, except to say that nothing has yet been signed and sealed. But it's pretty likely to happen. And if that were to be the case, the best way to put what he's trying to say over would obviously be to take a school that doesn't have singing in its culture, and show just what can happen when it starts to acquire it...

"Although, of course, we'd never do anything that couldn't be sustained afterwards. It couldn't be like having a great cultural build-up to the Olympics, and then there's the opening night, and that's that. It would have to be something that you would leave behind you to continue."

Visions of a school singing its way straight out of special measures and into Ofsted's ranks of excellence leap to mind, and, at the thought, Goodall's irrepressible optimism resurfaces. "You see, the thing is, it does work. I really do believe it works. It transforms children and schools, and I like to think that there is a tipping point where it all starts to take off and then becomes self-sustaining.

"Of course, doing it in secondary schools will be a much bigger task, but even there, all kinds of things are possible."

He tells a story about a recent visit to a secondary school in Guildford, where a boys' choir of 90 sang "Chasing Cars" by Snow Patrol, in remembrance of a fellow-pupil who had recently been killed, and how heartfelt and vocal was the girls' appreciation of the boys' performance. And how the whole event had completely turned on its head any notion that singing was sissy, and not something with which cool boys should ever get involved.

"I've had hundreds of great moments like that, and they always make me cry,'" he says. "Of course, what we're trying to do is a very great aspiration. And this is an awfully big country, with a lot of people in it. We aren't going to be able to do it overnight. But let's at least set out hopefully towards it."