working with the Youth Justice Team in the deprived community Clydebank, Scotland
Indigenous People believes that active participation in music, dance and other forms of cultural expression can contribute to healthier, happier and more connected individuals and communities. Our educational programmes bring people into direct contact with cultural traditions that may be very different from their own, creating opportunities to participate, communicate and learn together.
The social and educational challenges to which this work can contribute are complex and have many causes. We do not suggest that cultural education provides simple solutions. We do believe, however, that direct cultural encounters, creative participation, physical activity and shared experience can make a meaningful contribution.
Cultural Understanding and Social Cohesion
Britain is an increasingly culturally diverse society. This creates enormous opportunities for cultural exchange and enrichment, but prejudice, racism and hostility towards difference remain significant social problems.
In the year ending March 2025, 137,550 hate crimes were recorded by police in England and Wales. Because of changes to the Metropolitan Police recording system, the most reliable year-on-year comparison excludes the Metropolitan Police. On that basis, recorded race hate crimes increased by 6% and religious hate crimes by 3%. Religious hate crimes targeting Muslims increased by 19%.
Statistics cannot explain the complex causes of prejudice, nor tell us how best to address it. But meaningful personal contact between people from different backgrounds has an important role to play.
Our educational programmes enable children to engage directly with highly skilled African artists who present and explain their own cultural traditions. Rather than encountering Africa primarily through stereotypes, news reports or second-hand representations, the children meet African people as musicians, dancers, teachers and cultural practitioners.
Through performance, discussion and participation, cultural difference becomes something to explore and enjoy. We therefore seek to encourage curiosity, understanding and respect while challenging simplistic or negative stereotypes.
Social Connection and Isolation
Social connection is increasingly recognised as an important determinant of health and wellbeing.
The World Health Organization’s 2025 Commission on Social Connection estimates that around one in six people globally experience loneliness, with rates particularly high among adolescents and young adults, where approximately one in five report experiencing it. The WHO also identifies social isolation and loneliness as significant risks to physical and mental health, quality of life and longevity. Children and young people now have unprecedented access to communication, information and entertainment through digital technology, but digital connection does not necessarily provide the same experience as direct participation with other people.
Traditional participatory music and dance provide an unusually direct form of social interaction. Participants listen to one another, respond to a common rhythm, coordinate their actions and contribute to a shared activity. Success depends not only upon individual ability but upon awareness of the group. This is particularly evident in many traditional African musical cultures, where music, dance, song and communal participation are closely interconnected.
Our workshops allow children to experience this directly. Instead of remaining passive spectators, they become active participants: playing, moving, singing, listening and responding to one another. The resulting experience is both individual and collective. Participants can experience the satisfaction of mastering something themselves while simultaneously contributing to something that only works when people cooperate.
For children who may be isolated, lack confidence or struggle to find a comfortable role in conventional educational settings, this kind of shared creative activity can provide a different way of connecting with other people and experiencing themselves as a valued member of a group.
Physical Activity
Physical inactivity among children and young people remains a significant concern.
UK Chief Medical Officers recommend that children and young people average at least 60 minutes of moderate or vigorous physical activity each day across the week. Sport England’s 2024/25 Active Lives research found that 49.1% of children and young people were meeting this recommendation — meaning that more than half were not. Childhood obesity also remains a serious public-health challenge. In England in 2024/25, 10.5% of Reception-age children and 22.2% of Year 6 children were living with obesity.
These problems have complex social, economic, environmental and behavioural causes, and no individual educational programme can provide a solution. Nevertheless, we believe it is important for children to encounter forms of physical activity that are enjoyable, creative and social.
Dance, drumming and participatory performance involve movement without presenting themselves simply as exercise. They demonstrate that physical activity can be part of creativity, music-making, celebration and communal life.
Engagement, Learning and Achievement
Not every child responds equally well to conventional classroom-based learning. Some pupils struggle academically, become disengaged from education or find it difficult to experience a sense of achievement through traditional academic subjects.
Music, dance and other creative activities can provide different routes into learning. They offer opportunities to develop skills through listening, movement, repetition, cooperation and practical participation, and can allow children who may lack confidence in other areas of school life to discover abilities which they and their peers may not previously have recognised.
Research reviewed by the Education Endowment Foundation suggests that participation in the arts can have positive effects on wider academic attainment, including literacy and mathematics. Research into music education has also identified potential benefits for language and communication and for skills associated with self-regulation and executive function.
Our own experience reinforces the importance of this broader view of learning. During more than 25 years of educational work, we have repeatedly seen children who teachers describe as difficult to engage become absorbed by drumming, dance or performance. In some cases, young people who had become substantially disengaged from school have responded particularly strongly to the musicians, gaining confidence and a renewed interest in participating in education.
These experiences do not mean that music provides a simple solution to educational disengagement. They do demonstrate, however, that children can respond very differently when presented with unfamiliar forms of learning and achievement. A child who struggles to demonstrate ability through written or academic work may discover that they can master a complex rhythm, learn a dance sequence, lead part of an ensemble or contribute successfully to a group performance. Experiences of competence and achievement can matter greatly, particularly for pupils whose previous experience of education may have been dominated by difficulty or failure.
Learning Through Participation
Participatory music and dance develop skills extending well beyond music itself.
Drumming requires concentration and careful listening. Ensemble playing requires participants to understand their own role while remaining aware of what others are doing. Dance involves coordination, memory and physical confidence. Learning unfamiliar rhythms requires persistence, while performing collectively requires cooperation and discipline. Our workshops therefore encourage concentration, listening, coordination, creativity, confidence and teamwork in an environment designed to be enjoyable and highly participatory.
They also offer something that cannot easily be reproduced through textbooks or screens: direct interaction with people from another cultural background.
Children can watch, listen, participate, ask questions and learn directly from the artists themselves. Cultural education consequently becomes not simply the transmission of information about other people, but an encounter between people.
Why This Approach Succeeds
The challenges described above are very different and should not be reduced to a single explanation or solution. Prejudice, social isolation, educational disengagement, physical inactivity and poor wellbeing all have multiple and complex causes.
What connects them for our purposes is the combination of direct cultural encounter, shared activity and active participation.
The approach succeeds because it does not rely solely on explanation. People learn by doing.
Participants are not simply told about another culture; they meet people who practise it. They do not simply hear that cooperation is valuable; they experience the need to listen and respond to others in order for the music to work. They do not simply learn that physical activity is beneficial; they move, dance and play as part of an enjoyable creative experience.
The approach can also succeed because it creates opportunities for achievement outside conventional academic structures. A child who may struggle in one educational setting can discover competence and confidence in another.
Participatory cultural activity brings people together. It combines interaction, physical movement, concentration, cooperation, creativity and enjoyment. When that activity involves people from different cultural backgrounds, it also creates opportunities for exchange, curiosity and understanding.
This is why participation lies at the heart of Indigenous People’s educational work. Through music, rhythm, dance and direct cultural encounter, we seek to create experiences which are enjoyable and enriching in themselves, but which can also contribute to greater understanding, stronger social connection, renewed engagement with learning and improved wellbeing.
For a broader explanation of the principles and values underlying our work, please see our Mission Statement.