We began working with Sibelius, the leading provider of notation software for the secondary education sector, in January 2008. Working principally with the education media, our brief is to reinforce Sibelius’ strong reputation with the secondary sector and build product sales and reputation within the primary sector.

We are currently preparing press materials to launch Sibelius’ Film Composition Competition for secondary schools, to be judged by a panel that includes Howard Goodall and Lord Puttnam. We also have several case study-led features in progress, for example Sibelius is being used for a collaborative project between primary schools in Heathrow and Kenya.

In addition we have been asked to work with the specialist music press to reiterate the fact that Sibelius is the software of choice for many music professionals.

As Sibelius is becoming almost as ubiquitous for music as Word is for words we have encouraged users to talk about how the technical intuitiveness of the product has enabled their creativity. So, for example, pre-Oscars we put out a press release on Dario Marianelli, composer of the Atonement score, in which he said that ‘Panorama view’ in Sibelius helped his arrangements because he thinks in music, not pages.

There is a lot of coverage about music in schools and debates around music performance but the work we are doing focuses on the creative talents of young people in the area of composition.