BMC (Budding Musicians Club) is an affordable after-school music group tuition service for children aged 5 - 15 years. We have a capacity of just over 300 students per year. In partnership with The Conservatoire in Blackheath, our bursary awards scheme provides individual tuition for ten students per year, with additional discretionary support for continuity funding. The project has successfully engaged many hundreds of children and young people from an area of deprivation, giving them opportunities to explore music that they might not have otherwise had.
One of our former bursary winners recently volunteered to return as a class assistant, and the outcome has been tremendously helpful to the tutor, the students and of course to the volunteer, whose self-confidence and social skills have grown along with their musicianship.

If other bursary winners aged eleven and upwards were to return to BMC as assistants and young mentors, even for a single term, it would greatly enrich the learning experience for everybody. It would give our bursary winners a valuable opportunity to pass on their skills through peer-to-peer learning, sustaining their engagement with music and developing their intuition and self esteem. It would greatly benefit our BMC students to have additional encouragement and support in the group environment. Crucially, it would add a unique element to the BMC progression route, feeding back into the pool of emerging talent from which our bursary winners were originally drawn.

We are hoping to raise the sum of £5000 to establish a Peer Mentoring Programme. The fund would be used for training, programme management, supervision and observation, and the provision of travel expenses for our peer mentors.