Noise Solution impact report 2021

Pioneering digital youth work and measuring its impact on well-being After a Noise Solution programme, an independent Social Return On Investment investigation (SROI) con rmed savings for services and families of 334% (with 190% of those savings being ‘in year one’).

61% of participants nish above, at or within two points of the UK national wellbeing average, which has been drawn from a UK sample of 60,000 respondents to the same well-being scale.

Over three years we’ve consistently demonstrated highly statistically signi cant improvements in well-being amongst participants (using an NHS-validated scale).

Prepared by: Damien Ribbans, Operations Director, & Simon Glenister MEd, CEO, April 2021.

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Foreword from our CEO

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Foreword from our Operations Director

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What does Noise Solution do?

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Context

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Self-determination Theory informed practice

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Our new group work offer

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Our response to Covid-19

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Delivery data

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Diversity, equality and inclusion

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Impact Data

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Meet the board

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Future plans

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Funders and partners

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#NeverMoreNeeded NHS digital has just released data on young people’s mental health. It shows that in 2017, ‘one in nine’ young people were presenting to NHS with diagnosable mental health conditions. That same survey was conducted at scale after the rst lockdown, and the results show that the ratio of those presenting with diagnosable conditions is now signi cantly higher at ‘one in six’. We only anticipate that this has worsened over the second and third lockdowns. Mental health services are strained and, with the best will in the world, not all young people engage with or respond well to talking therapies.

“Never more needed” is a term I’m hearing more and more. As a slogan, it is designed to highlight the need for the agility and effectiveness of charitable and social enterprise organisations like Noise Solution. Over the last year, we’ve epitomised agility and effectiveness, and our use of digital tools to do so has enabled us to easily capture the digital data to demonstrate that impact. Noise Solution has the

combination of digital skills and understanding to engage young people to

impact on their levels of motivation and well-being in a way that doesn’t ‘problematise’ or ‘medicalise’ them. Again and again, our programmes create the conditions that enable young people to choose to ourish, reaf rming that we are indeed #NeverMoreNeeded

Simon Glenister, CEO

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Foreword from our CEO

As an organisation, Noise Solution has always been pretty ‘digitally native’. Our entire infrastructure is built digitally and we are truly paper-less. Back in early 2020, we had no idea just how important this level of digital literacy would prove to be.

When the news of the pandemic hit in mid-March 2020, our team spent a day or two reeling from the news and trying to come to terms with what it meant for us, our families and those around us.

From there, we all jumped on a Zoom call and worked together to come up with a solution which not only meant we could keep the organisation going but also continue to meet the need which was inevitably going to increase as the pandemic worsened.

Within four days, our team had pulled together a 100% digital offer which took advantage of our existing digital infrastructure and leveraged online calling and browser-based music-making software. It was rough and ready, but it worked and we began delivering online sessions.

Over the subsequent twelve months, we have spent a signi cant amount of time and effort developing and honing our offer, including a complete overhaul of our digital platform and building in intelligent automation to deliver the right information to the right people at the right time in the right way.

I am incredibly proud of our team and the product we have produced and, more importantly, the impacts we are generating through our work. Noise Solution changes lives, and I have the pleasure of actually seeing that every day.

Damien Ribbans, Operations Director

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Foreword from our Operations Director

What does Noise Solution do?

Do you remember as a kid how much it mattered when someone said you were good at something? How sometimes that changed how you felt about yourself?

Imagine how much more impact it would have if you could see yourself being good at that 'thing' and if you could see other people telling you were good - especially when the rest of the world is probably telling you you're not doing the right things. That sums up what Noise Solution does.

The evidence base and theory of change behind our work is very detailed, but what we do is actually very simple: •

We pair participants with professional Musicians (of the informal variety skilled at beat making, production and songwriting) either 1:1 or in groups.

•

Together, participant and Musician co-create a musical project in whatever genre the participant is into. We use freely available digital music-making tools to make the music important to the participant, quickly.

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Musician and participant capture the highlights of each session using audio, photos, videos and text and develop an individual digital story or weekly ‘feed’ of their growing success

•

Participants also record a weekly re ection of their thoughts and feelings about the process.

•

We provide the platform and use the skills people already have with social media to do this - everyone captures their own developing story, re ections on it and shares it.

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Participants invite into their ‘feed’ people who they have identi ed as important to them (generally family/carers and professionals such as teachers, care co-ordinators or social workers).

•

This ‘community group’ are encouraged to comment and contribute on what they have seen every week. This is vital to our impacts. As those important to our participant focus on an emerging strengths based story rather than what’s ‘going wrong’ in the participants life.

•

We’re enabling participants to feel ‘seen’ by those they care about which validates them and allows them to internalise their new feelings of success.

Watch the video above to hear more about how Noise Solution works.

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•

Context Noise Solution presents as a music organisation, but music is just a vehicle. We are, in fact, an organisation that is interested in and focused on improving well-being.

Working with populations often unfairly labelled ‘hardest to reach’, we are not traditional music teachers and we don’t provide music lessons on scales or notation.

We may make beats and produce songs, but we music mentor in a very speci c way designed to improve motivation and well-being.

Why is well-being important? Because, increased well-being is a well-evidenced determinant of better engagement, health, social and educational outcomes.

Since 2009, Noise Solution has delivered one-to-one music mentoring (and latterly in group-work contexts) to young people facing all sorts of challenges around engagement, mental health, education and motivation.

What began with the

recognition that many young people were being failed by

services has grown into an evidence-driven delivery pedagogy underpinned by signi cant research and understanding into what works and crucially why it works.

Using evidenced frameworks is essential to our understanding of our practice and improving well-being.

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Self-determination Theory informed practice Self-determination theory (SDT) is arguably the most well-evidenced framework for understanding how to improve well-being and motivation. SDT has over 350,000 Google Scholar citations to date from multiple academic teams around the world. At Noise Solution, we use SDT to inform how we encourage the right feelings that SDT tells us are vital for well-being to

ourish. Our approach avoids medicalising or

problematising people. We allow the participant to drive their own change. We stay clear of trying to nd a 'magic-bullet' activity or procedure that we ‘do to' people to try and ' x them’. It’s these ingrained values and practices that go some way to explaining our success.

Autonomy

Relatedness

Competence

SDT states that we need to facilitate three key psychological needs: competence, autonomy and relatedness, and we've mapped this framework to a Noise Solution set of sessions. Participants experience autonomy from the outset when they are

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asked: “What music would you like to make?” They individually design every programme with the musician around their own musical interests. It’s then our job to make each participant feel a sense of competence. It’s our knowledge of how to get ‘quick wins’ using music technology with them that achieves this. Highlights of every session are captured and securely shared with family and key workers through our cloud platform, enabling them to contribute via comments over the weeks, creating a community around the participant providing a sense of relatedness. In this way, we build a new strengths-based narrative around the participant that encourages the protective factors evidenced to increase motivation and well-being.

Watch this short lm to see what that looks like:

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Our new group work offer In August 2019, Noise Solution was successful in a grant application to the Spirit of 2012 Carers Music fund for a group work project in partnership with Suffolk Family Carers. Our interest in this grant was to test whether or not we could apply our 1:1 pedagogy and theory of change to a group work context. If we could make it

"With the group, I was able to build friendship and help social anxiety, andI learned how to work in a group; we all got a chance to share our own experiences. (..) it (the sessions) helped me relax and helped me think about something else; it was a safe place for me.”

work, we would be able to generate multiple sets of impact in one group as well as develop another programme which would be suited to small groups.

We began this project in November 2019 and completed it in December 2020. We initially intended to deliver these sessions face-to-face, but the onset of the pandemic forced us to move all sessions online from March 2020. Across the lifetime of the project we engaged with 95 young women with caring responsibilities across Suffolk, either in a group work or 1:1 context.

This was an incredibly challenging piece of work in itself, made even more dif cult with the onset of the pandemic. Despite all the challenges, we now have a group work offer suitable for small groups of participants (around 6 per group) which can be delivered either online or face-to-face. You can nd out more here.

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Our response to Covid-19 In March 2020, our lives and our work changed signi cantly. Since 2009, we’ve delivered face-to-face, one-to-one music mentoring in participants homes, schools, community centres, recording studios and other community venues. Overnight, our ability to engage with participants face-to-face was removed.

Noise Solution has always been digitally native; our use of music technology (predominantly laptop-driven) alongside digital tools such as the Participant Community meant we weren’t approaching this issue from a standing start.

While we were used to operating digitally, we still had to gure out the answers to the following questions: 1. How can we create music digitally with our participants using tools which were easily available, easy to use, do not require any downloading and would work across a variety of devices?

2. How can we reach into participants’ homes and engage with them digitally?

3. How can we build relationships with participants and those around them remotely?

Within four days, we had a viable online offer available using a combination of our current digital infrastructure, VIP Studio Sessions from Charanga® (a browser-based music-making tool) and integrated Zoom video calling.

We started working with current participants online from the end of March 2020.

Over the last 12 months, we have worked hard to develop and re ne this initial digital offering, taking

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experience, while being mindful of the need for proper, robust safeguarding management processes.

We now have a 100% digital offer which: •

Uses VIP Studio Sessions by Charanga®, which offers a browser-based Digital Audio Workstation and lots of bitesized tutorials in a wide variety of genres for between-session learning.

•

Automatically creates individual Zoom links and passwords for each session which is made available to the participant within the Participant Community 15 minutes before each session.

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Has inbuilt safeguarding systems and processes where anyone who uses the Participant Community can log a concern easily, and this concern is agged to senior staff immediately. Safeguarding concerns are managed within our digital infrastructure meaning nothing is missed, and the Board is able to view (anonymous) safeguarding cases in their own Community.

•

Automates the sending out of the right information to the right people in the right way (including video messages) at the right time to encourage easy, enjoyable and impactful engagement with the Participant Community.

This move to digital working has made us also develop other infrastructure. We have built a Recruitment Community, where prospective Musicians can upload the documents required for our safer recruitment practices with checks in place to ensure we collect all the right information, every time. We have also developed a video-based induction and training process for Musicians, meaning we can now recruit and train Musicians anywhere in the country.

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what we know about Self Determination Theory and applying this to a digital

Delivery data The data below relates to all Noise Solution delivery between 01/04/2020 and 31/03/2021.

Hours delivered:

Home/school - 296 hours

Online 1,545 hours

Studio 307 hours

Attendance: 80% Completion: 74%

While our delivery footprint remains mostly in the East of England, our ability to now deliver online means we are able to reach other parts of the country.

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The switch from face-to-face to online working

GENDER BREAKDOWN

coupled with the uncertainties surrounding the

Not disclosed 15%

pandemic has meant that some of our data collection was challenging, especially in the early

Other 2%

days.

Male 46%

Our systems and processes are now much better, and the quality of the data we collect has also

Female 37%

now improved.

AGE RANGE

Under 11 or not given

11-16

16-24

24-30

Over 30

Diversity, equality and inclusion In 2020, the world watched an horri c 8-minute video that documented the murder of George Floyd in the United States. Suddenly, instantly, an awakening about racial injustice went global, including here in the UK. Noise Solution helps people create music as part of an approach to help improve their well-being and motivation. Increasingly, our work is reaching beyond the East of England, with online sessions now enabling us to reach the homes of people right across the UK. This presents more opportunities to change lives, and it also brings us into contact with people whose backgrounds may differ drastically from our own. While undoubtedly our work is primarily to help create an environment where individuals can be autonomous and ourish, the ability to successfully do this with people who

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have a kaleidoscope of varying identities will be crucial and requires consistent engagement with topics and issues that can impact our work.

Noise Solution wants to do much more for diversity, equity and inclusion across all of our work. We have set up a Board subgroup led by Dr Ronda ŽeleznýGreen. Dr Železný-Green is a mobile technologist, trainer, and researcher with gender expertise, whose professional experience spans the public, private, and civil society sectors. She has provided

Dr Železný-Green

quantitative and qualitative market insights and

project implementation leadership for a wide range of stakeholders including schools, mobile network operators, governments, and international NGOs. This work will inform the diversity data we collect and crucially why we collect it and what we do with it. This is an active piece of work and we will be reporting on it in due course.

Impact Data As an organisation, Noise Solution aims to positively impact on well-being. This is because of the wealth of evidence which shows that if we positively impact on wellbeing we get better health, social, education and engagement outcomes. These are all the things other organisations are aiming to achieve, often in isolation.

Noise Solution measures its impacts on well-being using the Shortened Warwick Edinburgh Mental Wellbeing Scale (SWEMWBS). SWEMWBS was developed by Warwick and Edinburgh Universities and the NHS and has been used at scale multiple times. This means we have a national sample size (c. 60,000 responses) against which we can compare our performance. This sample size gives us reliable bandings of low, medium and high levels of well-being to benchmark against.

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31/03/2021 across both face-to-face and online provision. We saw:

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A 24.33% reduction in low well-being;

•

A 13.51% increase in moderate well-being, and;

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A 10.81% increase in high well-being.

Before

After

Low

Medium

High

Additionally, we saw 68% of our participants

No 32%

Yes 41%

nish at or within a meaningful range of the national well-being average (an increase of 35%).

Within two points 27%

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The chart below shows our impact performance for the period 01/04/2020 to

If we look at online delivery only during this period, we see: Before

After

Low

Medium

High

This shows: •

A 25% reduction in low well-being;

•

A 20% increase in moderate well-being, and;

•

A 5% increase in high well-being.

Our platform performs all these calculations and many more automatically, and you can watch a short lm about our impact capture and analysis below.

Video about Noise Solution’s impacts

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Between February and April 2020, we went out to recruit new Non-Executive Directors to complement our current Board as we look to grow Noise Solution. We are incredibly proud to have received such an excellent response and to now bene t from a Board with such experience and commitment to our work.

Dr Mike Blows is a Consultant Child Psychiatrist for Norfolk and Suffolk Foundation Trust.

Mike is also Medical Lead for Looked After Children, acting as an expert advising on child welfare cases in the family courts.

Nettie is a mental health nurse and has worked as a practitioner, team leader and manager in the public sector, voluntary and private organisations for over 30 years.

Nettie got involved with Noise Solution having seen rst hand the positive difference that using creativity and music with people across all ages can make to their well being and self esteem.

Dr Ronda Železný-Green is a mobile technologist, trainer, and researcher with gender expertise, whose professional experience spans the public, private, and civil society sectors. She has provided quantitative and qualitative market insights and project implementation leadership for a wide range of stakeholders including schools, mobile network operators, governments, and international NGOs.

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Meet the board

School of Education at the University of East Anglia.

Her research is primarily based within the framework of SelfDetermination Theory (SDT) and aims to inform the implementation and evaluation of intervention programmes designed to facilitate optimal motivation, well-being, and performance in young people.

Kimberley has worked closely with many eminent SDT scholars, including the theory’s co-founder, to provide important conceptual advances to the theory and its application.

Tamzin Byrne is currently working at Cambridge University supporting social entrepreneurs to get started and grow with Cambridge Social Ventures. Tamzin has also been involved in educational strategy, student welfare and advocacy as a Trustee of Murray Edwards College and of the Cambridge University student unions. Before coming to the UK, Tamzin worked in communication and partnership roles in scienti c research, with universities, research institutes and government in Kenya and Australia.

Adrian Alexa is technology entrepreneur, highly passionate about the health-tech space, especially the intersection of life-sciences, digital technologies, data sciences and healthcare. He loves crafting products, solving challenging problems and building motivated teams. This is re ected in the fantastic culture developed at the genomic software startup he co-founded, repositive.io. He is business savvy, with a strategic mindset always looking into balancing technology, product requirements and design with the market needs.

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Dr Kimberley Bartholomew is an academic working in the

Anindita is a

nancial services executive with a wealth of

experience in business strategy, operations, technology and risk management, gained through 19+ years with leading international nancial services institutions.

Anindita is passionate about driving positive social impact, leading on tech-for-good strategy to promote

nancial

capability and inclusion in her latest role at HSBC and through her voluntary roles as a mentor to purpose-driven individuals (On Purpose associates, UnLtd social entrepreneurs) and a Trustee of Good Vibrations charity that supports vulnerable communities.

Andrew Tunnicliffe comes from the insurance sector, having held senior positions with large multinational organisations such as Aon Global Risk Consulting, Chief Operating Of cer for Aon Risk Solutions (EMEA) and latterly as Chairman (Global & Specialty) for Aon. Andrew brings big business acumen and a keen eye for risk management.

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Future plans We have a number of exciting plans in the pipeline for the next 12 months and beyond. The development of our digital infrastructure has opened up a number of complementary opportunities to further develop our work, both in terms of our geographical reach but also in terms of innovative digital developments to further enhance our application of digital youth work.

Being able to deliver digitally means we are now able to engage with participants wherever they may be, including outside of our current geographical footprint of the East of England.

We have already been working with participants in the North of England, the West Country and the Midlands. We are now developing more formal relationships with national organisations to deliver online support in all parts of the country with a view to developing local links and then being able to deliver face-toface work with local Musicians in other parts of the country.

We are aware that the digital infrastructure we are building is applicable to many other organisations and we are frequently asked if we are able to licence it.

We are actively looking at preparing our digital infrastructure for use by other third and public sector organisations.

The last 12 months have demonstrated to us the opportunities which can be provided by the smart use of technology.

We are working on leveraging the opportunities provided to us by arti cial intelligence and machine learning to turn our rich qualitative data (from our digital stories) into actionable impact insights.

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Funders and partners We’d like to sincerely thank all the funders and partners that have helped us to achieve the results demonstrated within these pages.

The staff are phenomenal. Nothing is too much trouble. They build up effective relationships with students and staff. The tutors are fab and clearly inspire our students. The support from Simon and Damien is also excellent and you feel con dent knowing that you can email then with any queries or issues. In terms of interventions, it is probably the best intervention I have encountered. This programme transforms students' lives. - SENDCo.

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