How Choirs Beating Time works
Choirs Beating Time, our award-winning flagship programme, uses the proven power of group singing through prison choirs to improve mental wellbeing, build confidence and strengthen social inclusion – all of which are key factors in reducing reoffending.
Weekly rehearsals are led by our professional Music Directors, all with experience working in the community and with vulnerable groups
Peer support is integral to our approach – experienced choir members are encouraged to mentor others, developing both musically and personally.
Weekly Rehearsals
Choirs Beating Time runs a two hour choir session in each prison we work in, once a week, for 50 weeks a year.
Regular Performances
Our groups are open to everyone in the prison community and led by skilled Music Directors. The choirs perform, write songs and record.
Family Days
Our family programme provides regular monthly concerts at family visits for our choir members and full day events for parents and children in the school holidays.
A Community Asset
Each choir has its own personality, adapted to meet the particular needs identified by the prison and our singers.
How Choirs Beating Time reduces reoffending
CBT creates 5 of the 7 desistence factors
Having hope and motivation
Having someone believe in you
Having the opportunity to contribute
Having a non-criminal identity
Having work
Having family ties
Having housing
The Ministry of Justice has identified seven key factors which impact recidivism. Three are external and tangible: housing, family and work. In other words – somewhere to live, someone to love and something to do.
Four are internal: hope and motivation, belief from others, opportunity to contribute, and a non-criminal identity. In short: I know who I am. I know that I can. You believe in me. You’ll let me try.
The needs that prison choirs address
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Poor mental health:
There were 54,000 reported incidents of self-harm in 2019 in English prisons. 50% of prisoners suffer depression and/or anxiety. Group singing significantly improves mental health.
Social exclusion:
Of people serving sentences, 25% have been in care, 41% excluded from school, 15% have psychosis, 15% are homeless, add in poverty and addiction – many feel they have never belonged to society. Prison choirs are positive, socially inclusive groups.
Inadequate “purposeful” activity:
Work, education and other activities are known to aid rehabilitation. We provide hundreds of hours of purposeful activity for the prisons we work with.
Poor work prospects:
Having work halves reoffending rates. Through choir and performing people develop the “soft skills” employers need.
Fractured Families:
There are c.320,000 children in the UK with a parent in prison. Visits can be challenging and difficult to organise. Our family days create quality time and happy memories.
Heather Phillips and Pete Churchill, the people who started Beating Time in 2014, on our tenth anniversary celebration in July 2024
View Evidence
Children of Prisoners: Fixing a broken system
I loved singing in prison every Tuesday. I wish I’d found it sooner as it really helped with my mental health. I didn’t think I could sing but the lads and Pete were great at encouraging me to give it a go.
Best thing I did in there. It was a laugh, you’d forget all your problems and we were GOOD! We sang some great songs, it wasn’t what I thought a choir was.
What Choirs Beating Time achieves:
FOR OUR SINGERS
Improved Mental Health
Singers experience improved mental health and wellbeing, greater confidence and a positive community. They develop crucial life skills for the workplace. Prison choirs allow them to meet people who believe in them. And they get the opportunity to spend better quality time with their family.
FOR OUR PRISONS
Prison choirs: A community asset
We give prisons hours of meaningful, purposeful activity by creating a community asset which they can use to augment celebrations and mark important events. We also improve family visits. Choir is an effective mental health intervention and we create factors that reduce reoffending.
FOR FAMILIES
Positive family time
Imagine, instead of sitting on plastic chairs around a table that is screwed to the floor in a noisy prison visits hall, making costumes and instruments, performing from Lion King with your family. That’s what we do.
This is Sally, our Midlands Manager, picking up Jonathan’s High Sheriff’s award for “Great and Good Services to the Community”, from Michael Kuo.
Koestler Arts run a national annual competition for arts in UK Prisons and Detention Centres. We aim to record each of our choirs (both covers of songs and original compositions) for submission each year. To date we have won 76 Koestler Awards, including a Platinum and several Golds.
Listen to our award-winning entries on Our Music page.
Free Spiritz/ Choirs Beating Time in the community
Free Spritz was set up by Pete Churchill in order to continue working with some of our singers after release. The project consolidated our community presence in the West Midlands through a collaboration with Choir With No Name, a group run by Pete and Sally for people impacted by homelessness and marginalisation. It also provided an anchor for singers such as Aaron, who was deeply involved in local gangs before he went into prison. He sang with us inside for five years, from sentence to release, in both HMP Birmingham and HMP Featherstone. With Choirs Beating Time he recorded a song for his Mum’s funeral and won several Koestler Awards for his singing and songwriting. He joined Free Spiritz after release, is no longer gang-affiliated and is living (and singing) happily in the community.
LOCKED UP IN LOCKDOWN – TRACKS FROM THE INSIDE, 2020
When the pandemic hit in March 2020 and the Ministry of Justice suspended all in-person and group activity, Choirs Beating Time was forced to hit the pause button.
Even though we went into lockdown, we still wanted to make music at a time when we all needed it the most. Determined not to let a global pandemic stop them, our talented musical directors embarked on a remote song-writing project with some of our singers serving sentences.
And so began, Locked Up In Lockdown…
Locked Up In Lockdown – Tracks From the Inside is a 10-track album written and arranged remotely via exchanges of letters through Email A Prisoner.
