 So, hea aha te mea nui o te ao, hea waiata, hea waiata, hea waiata tohu pātai. I have just, appropriately deconstructed perhaps one of our most famous whakatauki, and then because I work in the creative arts and industries, I have creatively reconstructed it to suggest that perhaps the most important thing is singing, singing, singing. Good afternoon, I'm Teotia and I'm a singing addict. I love singing in all its forms. I love singing as a verb and a gerund. I love all the diverse ways that can impact people's quality of life from cradle to grave, and today I would like to briefly introduce you to the Singing Communities Project, which is a portfolio of research studies that I've been involved with emerging from the areas of vocal performance and choral studies, and give you a snapshot of my current project, which looks at the status of singing in primary schools and shows you an extract from the potential intervention model in practice. Singing activities feature prominently in a wealth of recent international studies into the neurosciences and music, into physical and psychological health and well-being, social school development, which my colleague has talked about, and social inclusion, and cognitive development. Community performance sites are providing musical contexts for the creation of healing interventions in the area of population health, and I use this as an example, not one of my research projects, but the Celebration Choir. I like to roll that out at all possible moments. It's a fantastic project from the Centre of Brain Research, headed by my very dear colleague, Professor Suzanne Purdy, with music therapist Alison Tamage and Sharon Story. However, we also have something similar in the Waikatoa at the moment in progress, Music Movesy Trust, which is singing, working with dementia patients. Community performance sites are also locations that can help communities counter the effects of diaspora and colonisation by sustaining languages and cultural knowledge through music-making, and I give it as an example there. Nikai was involved with Tuvalu Pacific Project, and we treated music as a biocultural music resource, and it was archival in that we digitalised all of their Tuvalu Amida archive, because it's really an apportioned representation of old songs in Tuvalu, and then of course decolonising the Māori voice. That's about partnerships with kapa haka groups, working towards the Matatini and talking about vocal health, and redefining rehearsing and what that might look like when you're going through what they call a campaign. In this project, the impact of singing extends into the learning cultures of universities and schools. Partnerships between practice-based singing researchers, performers like myself, and music educators are producing future teachers who think both as music constructors and critical cultural workers. This partnership has the potential to support the quality and quantity of music practice, in particular singing in New Zealand primary schools. Why is this important? Well, we know singing can impact people's lives in a very positive way. This stage of a child's learning experience is a critical moment in the development of a student's attitude to music, future opinion about music and participation in music. I'll add to that because I'm sure many of you may have had bad experiences in dance, but probably many more of you have had more experiences about your voice. And this is a really important stage for self-actualisation about your own singing ability, what that looks like and what that means. So, this brings us to the state of singing in primary schools. Rather than entering the debate on the benefits and effectiveness of an arts integrated curriculum, this programme sought to investigate how to improve singing cultures in primary schools. To do this, we undertook a national survey to understand the challenges primary schools face in creating, maintaining and sustaining music programmes and singing activities in the current New Zealand educational context. Central findings have allowed the researchers in the School of Music to empathise with the teachers, and this has allowed us to begin the process of creating meaningful and sustainable solutions. With this in mind, the findings have been contextualised within the international literature, and the most part are lined with international trends in music education, however there were two areas quite interesting, I think for us as tertiary teachers and researchers. There was a passionate discussion about the problems of an overcrowded curriculum at a primary school level, an issue that has created primary school teachers see, a generation of children that struggle to commit to this area, curriculum or non-curriculum, and have difficulty absorbing skills and knowledge beyond a superficial level of understanding, which I think filters up, certainly we find that in School of Music, it filters upwards to the tertiary level. Also another passionate discussion, and I'm full of literacy and numeracy people in this room, schools directing funds, resources and professional development away from the arts curriculum, many primary schools teachers found that deeply disappointing when increasingly empirical evidence shows that involvement with the arts leads to measurable cognitive gains and music construction in particular, showing positive effects on verbal memory and spatial skills, verbal ability and non-verbal reasoning, better questioning skills, more focused periods of intense concentration and greater understandings that problems can have multiple answers. In fact, the solution to the issues of overcrowded curriculum. So the current survey provides a snapshot of the context in which primary school teachers work and why the dilemma is complex and multifaceted. We can draw inspiration from many international models, including the United Kingdom model singing playgrounds. Singing playgrounds is a non-curriculum singing activity. Singing educators, they train a group of children to lead their peers in playing singing games in the playground. The children are trained to lead, share, adapt and create. And create singing games. And a teacher is trained to support them in that role. To understand this programme, we were able to bring the practitioners to New Zealand and provide over a week a national professional development event from which 60 primary school teachers around New Zealand came. A national singing day with over 250 children. It's quite loud. And through these activities and associated workshops over the week, we were able to create a platform for discussing a national vision for singing in New Zealand with professional teaching organisations, MENSA, choral federation, professional choral organisations and music therapy organisations and school teachers. And inspire those of us with the interest in taking singing forward in these schools. Kia ora tatakato.