The Egham Band Youth Brass Project

The Egham Band Youth Brass Project

Background

In 2008, St. Jude’s School took part in a Government funded scheme aimed at introducing children to playing musical instruments. St Jude’s had 90 Year 4 children on the scheme, as the principle was to give as many children as possible the opportunity to experience the benefits of learning how to play an instrument. The scheme was only funded for two years, enabling the school to hire the instruments and pay for a teacher. However, after government funding was withdrawn and pressures on family budgets changed, there simply was insufficient money to maintain the scheme and so it reduced until it ceased in July 2017, and with it the school brass band. The Egham Training Band was formed in 2010 to give the children somewhere to continue to play, this band was promoted to The Egham Youth Band in 2016. Many of those originally in the school at the start still play with Egham Youth Band today.

In 2017 The Egham Band decided to run its own scheme. Following initial planning and fundraising The Egham Band Youth Brass project was born and we started to teach 60 Year 5 junior school children in Sept 2018, in 2019 as well as the continuing to teach 60 children at the first school we added an additional 30 children at a second school. It had been our plan to start teaching an additional 30 children at a third school from Sept 2020, however, due to COVID these plans have been delayed.

Today

We are currently teaching Brass to nearly 100 children who started in Sept 2020. We also continue to teach the students from previous years that have continued to learn brass. Those that have continued at St Jude’s have formed St Jude’s Brass and on leaving St Jude’s at the end of the school year are invited to join Egham Training Band providing a place where they can continue to learn as a group as well as perform in front of an audience.

Future

From September 2021 our intention is to start teaching an additional 60 children. In order to do this we need to purchase an additional 60 p-Cornets & robust cases.

Fundraising is an ever important part of our project as with anything in life nothing comes free. To date we have raised funds to purchase around 100 p-cornets to enable to loan the students one each so they are able to take them home to practice and play together. The Band has also loaned brass instruments for those in St Jude’s Brass that have continued to play.

We are very grateful for the donations we have received and continue to receive without which we would be unable to run the project.

If you would like any additional information please contact us at: admin@eghamyouthband.org.uk