Richmond-based Marsha Swanson has drawn on more than 20 years of working with children to create TroubleChutes, a 15-song resource that helps pupils find the words for difficult feelings
A Richmond-based singer-songwriter has created a new music-based emotional literacy resource for primary schools, with a local primary school helping to shape the final version.
Marsha Swanson’s TroubleChutes combines 15 professionally recorded original songs with illustration and guided discussion. It helps children explore experiences they may struggle to put into words, from jealousy and bullying to divorce, grief, exclusion and anxiety.
St Mary’s Hampton CE Primary School became the first TroubleChutes Ambassador School. It helped refine the resource in its final stages and worked with Marsha on a filmed pilot featuring its pupils. Marsha also gave a screening for staff and parents and trained staff in using the resource. The school said it was “incredibly excited to be one of the first schools to access and use this innovative resource”.
Marsha holds a First-Class Honours degree in Psychology. She has spent more than two decades using music in her work with children across educational, charitable and specialist therapeutic settings. Her early work included lyric workshops with children at Kids Company. She later worked with children unable to access mainstream education, with five years of weekly supervision from child psychotherapist Dr Anne Alvarez of the Tavistock Clinic. Alongside this she has kept up a career as a recording artist and songwriter. She was credited for “lyrical consultations” on Martina Topley-Bird’s Mercury Prize-nominated album Quixotic. Psychotherapist and author Susie Orbach has described her as someone who “brings emotional literacy to songs while warming our hearts”.
Each song follows a character through a different experience. Children first talk about what the character might be feeling, then consider whether or how it connects to their own lives, with no expectation to share anything personal. Listening, drawing, movement and performance give pupils different ways to take part. Teachers need no specialist musical or psychological training to use the material.
Marsha said: “Children don’t always have the language to explain what is happening for them emotionally, but they can often recognise something in a song first. That little bit of distance can make difficult subjects easier to think about and talk about. Rather than telling them what they should feel, TroubleChutes aims to give children the space to understand what they feel and to hear how others in their peer group may experience the same situation completely differently.”
The songs were recorded by working musicians including BBC Rockschool’s Henry Thomas, Martyn Barker, Tony Qunta and Clifford Slapper. They have a contemporary sound intended to stand as music in its own right. The first single, Something Real, was released in July with additional production and mastering from Stuart Epps, whose credits include Elton John and Led Zeppelin.
The launch comes as England’s revised health education guidance, in effect since September, puts renewed focus on helping primary pupils recognise and talk about their feelings. 2025 research from the National Literacy Trust surveyed 8 to 18-year-olds. It found that 81.4% believed they were good at understanding other people’s point of view, but fewer than half (44.8%) felt they were good at expressing their own feelings.
TroubleChutes material was also used in a wider nurture programme at Oasis Academy South Bank Primary in Waterloo. A Year 3 teacher there reported that participating pupils appeared “more confident and motivated in class and outside in the playground”.
TroubleChutes was developed and published in partnership with specialist mental-health publisher Karnac Books. Find out more at troublechutes.co.uk.
