About Noise Solution

Noise Solution is a social enterprise which delivers 1:1 music mentoring sessions that have been independently proven to improve well-being amongst a population labelled ‘hardest to reach’. Uniquely, mentoring is enhanced through a digital platform that engages participant, family and professionals. As well as contributing to wellbeing impacts, the platform also captures and evaluates well-being impact both qualitatively and quantitatively. This duality of approach solves issues of rigorous impact capture often experienced by third sector organisations.

Our approach

Our approach is two-pronged. We have developed a digital sharing platform (reflective for participants and families of everyday social media experiences) which has been designed specifically to engage, compliment and reinforce an individualised 10-week mentoring program currently focused on music technology and beat-making (though we believe the options for widening the pedagogy to include other art forms or activities other than music are strong). We utilise both the benefits of personalised mentoring and a digital platform to connect and embed the impacts that the approach has by sharing participants success and encouraging external validation from those whose opinions the participant values. Additionally, all aspects of every interaction are measurable and reportable within the platform. Importantly, the participants voice in the form of comments and video reflection is front and foremost driving the process, rather than being an added-on evaluation exercise postintervention.

The platform inclusively engages participants (often refusing or struggling with engagement), their families and professional keyworkers around a story of the participants success (strengths based). This digital sharing scaffolds reflection for participants and family and reinforces successes whilst also allowing us to measure the impacts on well-being. The platform builds in rigorous statistical analysis and comparison against nationally benchmarkable well-being data (SWEMWBS), developed by the NHS and Warwick and Edinburgh Universities.

The evidence base

Our methodology arises from £100k investment in research and development over the last 5 years, plus a twoyear Research Masters at Cambridge University. This research looked at the evidence underpinning the psychological needs which have to be supported to increase engagement, understand and increase well-being, and how to measure change meaningfully. For a deeper understanding of the theoretical underpinnings of the work, Simon Glenister MEd (CEO, Noise Solution) has published about Noise Solution’s work and the evidence base. You can read more here.

In 2016 The Social Investment Consultancy carried out a year-long external evaluation report, looking at our impacts. The evaluation found that Noise Solution was highly statistically significant in positively impacting on well-being amongst its population. These results have been consistently replicated since.

Why well-being?

Whilst Noise Solution presents as a music project, our focus is on positively impacting on well-being. We focus on well-being because significant empirical evidence proves that if we improve well-being we get better health, social, educational and engagement outcomes. By focusing on well-being we can effect change in all of these areas, which means our approach is applicable across a wide range of people.

Understanding success

Success is individual, and it is important to recognise the small achievements alongside the transformational ones. Noise Solution does not impose pre-determined agendas on participants. Instead, Noise Solution creates a window of opportunity within which other organisations and individuals around a participant can re-engage with each other and acts as a catalyst for change to refocus negative trajectories into positive ones.

Progression is important to us. Through the Digital Story, we are able to engage those around a participant with the participants voice at the centre. Around session five we start looking with the participant at what they would like to do post-Noise Solution. The participants preferred progression routes are fed to the supporting professionals through weekly Session Reports.

Overall, Noise Solution sees about 71% completion and 88% attendance amongst its population of prolific nonattenders, phobics and the hardest to engage. All of the population data is only drawn from those who have completed as it relies on bivariate data and clearly those who don’t complete don’t provide end data. The 29% of those who don’t complete is made up of those who Noise Solution has not managed to engage with, but also those who move out of area or those who move on to other things before they have completed.

Covid-19

In March 2020 Covid-19 changed the face of the world and forced organisations such as ourselves to reach our target populations remotely. As a predominantly digital organisation anyway, Noise Solution was able to develop a 100% online offer within three or four days.

The underlying pedagogy remains the same, but we are now using a combination of:

• Zoom video calling - with unique links appearing within our Participant Community shortly before each session.

• Browser-based music-making software - with unique logins for each individual to their own workspace, including lots of bitesize tutorials on a wide range of music genres encouraging selfdirected learning.

• The Noise Solution Participant Community - containing all the information needed for each participant within a secure, cloud-based platform.

To date, Noise Solution has delivered over 2,500 hours of online delivery to participants across our current footprint of the East of England but also across East London and northern England.

We are currently engaged with a researcher from the University Of East Anglia who is working with us to understand the impacts that our work creates when it is delivered solely online. Anecdotally there is lots of interesting feedback around it being less intimidating for some participants who feel one step removed through the computer screen and therefore more comfortable, and also feeling more of a sense of ownership over the process because the participant is using their own device rather than the Musicians equipment.

It must be noted that, as valuable as the online experience is for some, the move to digital delivery has exposed a significant seam of digital poverty. This has meant that there is now a segment of our target population which we are unable to reach digitally. Whilst we have lent laptops to participants to enable them to engage this doesn’t help if the participant does not have access to the digital infrastructure needed to access the internet. We are able to deliver face-to-face sessions to these individuals, with all the Covid-secure protocols in place.