AIBU to think primary schools should not audition children for choirs?

[LovelyBranches]

Dd is 9 and loves singing. She goes to her school choir after school group and goes to signing lessons outside of school. She has competed (and won) at the Eisteddfod.

Yesterday she came home from school very upset, unbeknownst to us she had auditioned for a place in her choirs Christmas show which will be on tv. She didn’t get in. There were 3 children in her year that didn’t get in. DD was devastated and very upset about it.

Today she came home upset because the teachers had taken the new choir group to practice and DD had no one in her usual friendship group to eat with. She ended up eating with another girl in her class who hasn’t been very nice to her recently.

I feel really upset for DD, she sings all the time and will tell anyone who listens how she wants to work in the theatre when she is older. I am aware that the school probably had a limited number of places but I feel like they should have given places to all year 6 and year 5 pupils rather than what they did which was allow year 6 and pick selectively between year 5 and 4.

AIBU to think that schools shouldn’t have auditions for choirs at primary school level.

@LovelyBranches She should get another chance though. It’s hard but she’s y4. Needs a wider friendship group too. Sadly life is full of rejections and how could they take everyone? She’s got plenty going on with her singing do she can give others a chance, surely?

No auditions should be mandatory and children and parents have to learn about disappointment, you are been unreasonable.

@allchange5 , an eisteddfod is like a festival with all sorts of cultural competitions.
The National Eisteddfod is a big week-long event with competitions in things like singing, reciting, dancing, prose and poetry.
School children compete in the Eisteddfod yr Urdd.
There's also the Llangollen Eisteddfod and the YFC Eisteddfod.
There are also smaller ones like in a village, chapel or town.

@allchange5 Not quite the right spelling I think - but Welsh music, singing and art competitions and showcasing Welsh culture and heritage.

OP, this is probably totally off point, but just wondering - if your DD has already won in the Eisteddford competition recently, with another choir, could there be any chance she's gone on and on about it and annoyed the teacher? Could there be any chance that she now sings very loudly or something? I'm sure this isn't the case, but just trying to think what their logic could possibly be here? You would think, out of all the kids, they would definitely want a child with previous experience of the whole thing.

Also, how many didn't get in from Year 5 and were any of them choir members?

Sorry for incorrect spelling - and thanks for filling me in!

@allchange5 ,Ynys Môn 2026 | Urdd Gobaith Cymru
Llangollen International Musical Eisteddfod - Home
2026 | Eisteddfod

They aren't stuffy - the National one has rock concerts and lots of stalls.
If you go to S4C you can watch some past ones. Eisteddfod Ffermwyr Ifanc 2025 | Cystadlu'r prynhawn | S4C Clic
(They are in Welsh. Most programmes have optional English or Welsh subtitles.)

@allchange5 she didn’t win with a different choir as I understand it, she won as part of the school choir. It’s just that for this particular tv opportunity not every member of the school choir could participate and OP’s DD didn’t make the cut.

It looks like rather than using the opportunity to help her DD learn how to get over a bit of disappointment and expand her friendship group, OP wants her to get special treatment by attending the rehearsals (and who cares then about the other 2 year 4 kids in the same position). It’s presumably going to feel even worse when, having attended the rehearsals, her DD doesn’t get to participate in the recording, unless OP plans to then demand that she does.

Im sure you’re used to fighting for your DD OP but this is not a situation where it is merited and you’re actually making things worse.

It doesn't appear possible to vote in the poll any more, but I'm a primary school music specialist and I was going to vote YANBU.

I've worked in lots of different settings, state and private, with auditioned and unauditioned choirs, and over time I've come round pretty firmly to the belief that they should be unauditioned. The most important part of getting children to do music, to whatever level they want to take it, is engaging them non-judgmentally with happiness, open-mindedness and interest, forming positive associations and avoiding negative ones. People talk about resliance and poor little snowflakes, but these are very young children we're talking about. Experiences like this DO damage peoples' ability to positively engage with activities. I've personally met adults who have been permanently putt off by them, we probably all have.

I also think there are very few children who can't sing in tune when they're taught correctly and the material is chosen and arranged suitably, and a school with a decent music program should be able to assume any child who's been following it for a few years will have a usable sense of pitch in the same way they assume anyone who's completed all the early years phonics etc will be able to read to a certain level.

There are also more and less sensitive ways of selecting children for such things. Taking a class of 20 or 30 children and saying you're going to audition for three of them to play lead roles in a production is fine, because you're not singling out the remainder as losers. Anyone who doesn't get the role is not worse than everyone else, they just weren't the very top (which is partly dependent on suitability for the role, rather than anything general or absolute anyway, and much of this can be explained to them).

Auditioning a group of 20 for something and passing all except 3 of them is completely different. It no longer says "you're just like everyone else", but "everyone else is in normal/average range, except for you and the 2 other losers who are exceptionally below it". I'm shocked that nobody in the planning process would have considered this, to be honest.

For such a number of children, they should have just chosen two whole year groups. For a smaller number they might have been able to devise an audition process without such negative consequences.

I'm a bit late but I wholeheartedly agree with you.

What are you trying to achieve here? You're not happy with any response that does not support your take on things. No-one here can give you what you want. Take your complaint to the school and, if necessary, to the school governors. Maybe they can accommodate your wishes.

But if your child had been chosen you wouldn’t have cared about the audition process or the ones who also didn’t get chosen.

This all day long. Very well said.

I think this is really rubbish and poorly handled by the school

Yes, not every child can win at everything, and if they had just picked maybe the top third of those who auditioned from her year group, you would be unreasonable to be annoyed. But picking all but a couple is quite unkind. And I'm all for school sport and children's learning to both win and lose gracefully

It does feel really OTT for them to practice 4 times a day for weeks/months, at the expense of play times, lessons etc. How is your daughter doing a academically? If she has had lots of time off for surgeries etc then they may feel she cannot afford to miss more lesson time. However this should have been explained to you.

Exactly this!

I wouldn’t be happy if my child had been chosen either! Four rehearsals a day during the school day? That is way too intense and surely never being able to run around outside for months isn’t great for anyone.

I have no issue with kids losing or failing or learning how to lose or fail, but I think failing 3/20 and then having this level of intensity is very poor planning. Either have a larger or a smaller group - I can’t imagine they have to have precisely 40 children and couldn’t have 30 for example. So all the year above could do it and leave well enough alone. Or no one doing it also sounds like a fine option - what a crazy amount of rehearsals!

And surely if it’s this intense they’d need backup for the inevitable round of illnesses so maybe the 3 interested children could be understudies.

Yes. Very.
Life lesson right there. You don't always get what you want.

Sorry I just want to clarify the whole (as in the entire year group) of year six was picked and the whole of year 4, with the exception of 3 pupils? And again some of year 5? Sorry I'm very tired so getting very confused

Not wrong, just people are asking you to dial down on your reaction so that your child doesn't get even more upset than she already is. Try not to take it too personally. 🥰

I agree. I find that pretty horrible to exclude only 3 children, that would hurt me as an adult never mind at 9

READ THE THREAD.

20 children. 12 were chosen. 8 are not.

justasmallbiz
"READ THE THREAD.
20 children. 12 were chosen. 8 are not."

But as the OP says of those 8 " 5 of which didn’t audition and didn’t want to be part of it".

Good that you've contacted the school but honestly you should be minimising this now with your daughter. In the grand scheme of life it's not that deep and you are creating more upset for your daughter by constantly talking about it

OP also has no idea how many year 5 children weren't chosen. Is it not more likely that less of them were chosen/auditioned meaning more younger children were chosen

@PurpleThistle7 If alternates were required, they are probably already in the group practising.

The school is likely on a tighter schedule before recording as 2 weeks of Easter Holidays are due and they only have a few weeks to rehearse.

The general resilience, everybody is special in their own way, this rejection will be good for her to learn that she can't get her own way for being disabled, look at the nigh on superhuman paralympians and be inspired by them bollocks.

Anybody who has spent their life (however short that happens to have been so far) being told they are trying to get special treatment/need to learn to deal with it when things don't go their own way when they're already fighting every day to not give up due to things like pain, being unable to sit with their friends, to make it through the pain/additional physical or mental demands knows exactly what is meant by somebody pointing at a truly exceptional person and saying 'look, they're done alright for themselves, so it's just a matter of adopting a Growth Mindset' - 'It's your fault, think happy thoughts and conform to our preferred image of the happy, smiling Disabled that's oh, so very grateful for our crumbs and headpats so we don't have to think about how we discriminate against and exclude you every day'.