For many years Adey has been committed to working with students and community and disabled groups. This, she believes, is a vital link with audiences and with the audiences and performers of the future.

Quite apart from general enjoyment and cultural riches, it has been proven time and time again that music studies at school enhance concentration, attention span and personal expression in all subjects across the syllabus. Why the arts and their traditional disciplines have been gradually relegated to a secondary importance in state education is mystifying, particularly in a country with such a rich singing and theatre tradition.

Learning sign language (BSL) has also been a major influence on several areas of Adey’s work and she now performs quite a bit of signed song – singing and signing at the same time. This is quite complicated as the signs must convey much more than the strict translation of the words of the song. The physical shape of them must create the atmosphere and shape of the music.

So, as a result of all these convictions, Adey has worked in numerous projects with a wide variety of groups, both amateur and professional, under the auspices of all of the major opera companies in the UK as well as such highly regarded international groups as the Brodsky String Quartet and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and for organisations such as Artangel, the Whitworth Art Gallery and Aldeburgh Music.

She has found herself

• riding a motorbike around with 200 children in a community opera


• devising wheelchair choreography


• performing with children and their drips in terminal cancer wards


• teaching plainsong to a church congregation


• shadow dancing with blind people


• devising mouth percussion accompaniments for a young people's summer school performance


• singing from a photographer’s rooftop


• playing rhythm games jumping up and down a staircase with an adult beginners class


• teaching The Little Green Frog Song to 50 vicars


• and writing a song about a farting elephant with an audience of 4-8 year-olds.