Children have not found it easy to express their feelings during a year often spent in lockdown with adults under pressure. Six primary schools in Norwich collaborated with an arts charity, a poet and a composer in a project giving a voice to young people’s hopes and fears

One by one, children in school ­uniform rush towards the video camera holding up placards with colourful words: “love”, “joy”, “hope”. Some are smiling proudly, others are singing through enormous gaps of lost teeth: “I choose love and joy and hope and share it round the world … I’m hoping for a world that wants to work together, I’m hoping for a cure to help the world recover, I’m hoping for a future that I’m yet to discover.”

This anthem, with its glorious, altruistic note of defiance, is the finale of a collection of songs that explores children’s experiences of the first lockdown. Charities and academics have warned that the disruption caused to children by the Covid pandemic – lockdowns, school closures, loss of routine, missing friends, strained relationships at home – may be ­creating a mental health time bomb. Early on in the first lockdown, Genevieve Raghu, artistic director and chief executive of the arts and education charity Into Opera, noticed that in all the early pandemic news coverage, the experiences of children were missing. “What is it like for them at the moment?” she wondered. When Raghu rang to ask one little girl and her family, there followed “a two-and-a-half-hour phone call, because she had someone who wanted to listen”.