Does anyone have any information about how young singers in choirs are taught?

I love choir music and have been listening to a lot of it lately because of it being almost Christmas. One of my favorite songs and choirs is In Dulci Jubilo by King’s College Cambridge.

In this choir is a mix of young kids and adults. I was wondering if any of you have had any knowledge of how the young kids are taught to sing so well at such a young age. Obviously they have a choir director, but I’m just hearkening back to when I was in grade school and remembering that back then (the olden days) we actually sang every day and had a music period at least a couple of times a week. We didn’t learn how to sing, we just sang, and we sounded like typical grade schoolers. It was fun, but no one’s voice was fantastic like the kids you hear in these big choirs.

Some of the kids from the Cambridge choir look like they could be 10 or 11 years old. Some of the kids in Libera look even younger. Their voices are amazingly beautiful, but I just can’t imagine how you could get a little kid to be able to sing like that, when I couldn’t even get my nephew, aged 11, to say more than two words, let alone sing, at our family Christmas party, and every school choir show I’ve ever been to, while very enjoyable, did not sound like these kids in the links.

How do they do it? Is it possible to take any kid and train them to sing like that? Or do the choir leaders have to go on a huge search to find kids who already have an amazing natural ability to sing, and then simply fine tune that ability?

This is how most school choirs sound, but I love this too : )