Education Story

The Celtic Connections Education Programme is a vital component of the festival. Every year, it provides thousands of Scottish school children with the opportunity to experience and enjoy their cultural heritage through free schools concerts and in-school workshops.

We sent Claire Snedden, our new Media Relations Assistant for Celtic Connections, along to one of the workshops to see (and hear) for herself exactly what happens when the schoolchildren of Glasgow are let loose on bodhrans, pipes and fiddles…

singing, clapping, banging, piping, strumming

The Celtic Connections Education Programme is a year-long initiative, which involves professional Celtic musicians visiting Scottish primary schools on a weekly basis for a sustained period of time. Pupils can learn everything from Scottish step dance and storytelling to traditional Scots and Gaelic song. The week I went along, the children from Gadburn Primary School for children with special educational needs were nearing the end of their course of lessons in traditional Scottish music.

I could tell the children loved taking part in these workshops from merely walking along the school corridors, which were decorated with photos of smiling kids posing with instruments during the previous week’s Celtic Connections school visit.

The great thing about these workshops is that they are interactive as well as instructive – the children not only learn about the instruments, but get to play them too. This balance works well, and the children were just as enthusiastic when it came to answering questions in the ‘recap’ session (in which our Celtic tutors quizzed the pupils on what they learned last week) as they were beating the bodhrans. So much so, in fact, that I shamefully found my own knowledge of Celtic instruments somewhat upstaged by that of a class of seven year olds…

All in all, the workshop entailed much singing, clapping, banging, piping, strumming and, best of all, dancing. When slightly more up-tempo songs were played on the bagpipes, the children all leapt out of their seats and danced around, despite complaints from one boy that the pipes “sounded like an earthquake.”

The workshop was a lot of fun, for me as well as the pupils and their teachers, and it was so great to see children not only learning about their country’s tradition, but getting the chance to really enjoy it.

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