Partner Schools

All FDS partners have a demonstrable track record of producing graduates with long term careers, providing professional training with recognisable identity and value in a complex market and have an emphasis on professionally focused opportunities and skill sets.

The Federation partners will achieve their aims:

By focusing on key shared values to inform our strategy and events: inclusion and participation holistic student centred support in training and employability

By engaging directly with the student/graduate perspective and experience in all activities, ensuring evidence based discussions inform collective and individual actions made to support diverse students development within the training environment and beyond.

By developing a programme of events with students, partners, teaching staff and/or with stakeholders that are intended to interrogate, review and shape the direction of conservatoire training, ensuring ethos, approaches and values remain current and best practice can be disseminated.

By providing a website and public information that offer guidance for prospective students in respect of the nature of provision at partner schools, details around events intended to maximise inclusion and participation and other activities reflecting the collective values, activities and projects within the partners – ensuring that prospective students can make informed choices in respect of training options.

By building direct relationships with authorities, professional bodies, stakeholders and employers, and contributing to discussions and external events, ensuring that dialogue happens positively and lobbying actively to drive change and celebrate achievements.

ArtsEd

London

We’re here to help you set the world alight.

At ArtsEd, our highly skilled, committed staff share their expertise and their passion for performance with pupils, sixth formers, undergraduates and postgraduates. We do this with energy, verve and joy in a uniquely warm and friendly atmosphere.

Making it in the performing arts isn’t easy. It takes guts, determination and ambition. Not to mention the small matter of talent. But if you believe you have these qualities and genuinely want to succeed, ArtsEd will give you an amazing experience and a formidable start. Our close links with the industry mean you’ll be learning from the best, from people who really know what it takes.

We constantly strive to ensure that inclusivity and diversity sit at the heart of everything we do. We are a founding partner of the Diversity School Initiative, which addresses under-representation and the lack of diversity in performing arts education, and we recently won an Industry Minds award for our approach to mental health awareness, support and action.

This year, we were awarded TEF Gold, the highest rating from the Teaching Excellence and Student Outcomes Framework and, for the third year running, we were ranked in the top-five drama schools for student satisfaction in the National Student Survey.

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Bristol Old Vic Theatre School

Bristol

Bristol Old Vic Theatre School is one of the most successful and well-respected conservatoire drama schools in the UK. Opened in 1946 by Sir Laurence Olivier, the School has welcomed many talented students over the years.

We attract the very best talent in students and staff, and our courses are recognised nationally and internationally as a benchmark of quality in professional acting, technical, production and management training.

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Drama Studio

London

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East 15

Loughton and Southend

We offer dynamic and unique courses for actors, directors, technical theatre specialists and students of theatre practice. We carefully select, teach and train students from the UK and from over 26 countries worldwide. Training at East 15 draws upon 50 years of tradition combined with a keen sense of the world of stage and screen today. Our international teaching professionals are from all areas of live and recorded performance, allowing our graduates to work successfully across the globe.

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Guildford School of Acting

Guildford

Delivering world-class conservatoire training and research within a top university environment.

Guildford School of Acting at the University of Surrey is one of the most highly regarded theatre schools in the UK with a vibrant community of performers, performance makers, creative practitioners and technicians graduating from our wide variety of programmes each year.

Building on a heritage of over 80 years and our reputation as arguably the leading musical theatre school in the world, we are passionate about helping our students to develop the practical, inter-personal and intellectual skills needed to make them employable in today’s highly competitive and ever-evolving creative industry.

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Guildhall School of Music & Drama

London

The Guildhall School is a vibrant, international community of young musicians, actors and production artists in the heart of the City of London. Rated Gold in the Teaching Excellence Framework and selected as one of the top ten performing arts institutions in the world (QS World University Rankings 2019), the School is a global leader of creative and professional practice which promotes innovation, experiment and research.

Of the 950 students across our programmes, 40 per cent come from outside Britain, representing more than 70 nationalities and bringing a truly global outlook and relevance to what we do.

We welcome diversity, and encourage applications from anyone with talent, regardless of background; our scholarship fund provides over £2 million to support students each year.

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Italia Conti

Woking

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LAMDA

London

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LIPA

Liverpool

LIPA is a specialist university-level provider of world class learning for performers and those who make performance possible. By studying a Degree or Foundation Certificate or developing your skills with a Masters degree, you become part of a creative community where you can grow, experiment and succeed. Our aim is for you to spend your life doing what you love and are good at, while being paid to do it. Put simply: sustained work in performing or making performance possible.

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Manchester School of Theatre

Manchester

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Mountview

London

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Oxford School of Drama

Oxford

The Oxford School of Drama is a world-leading conservatoire providing professional actor training in the form of a Three Year and One Year Course in addition to a Six Month Foundation Course.

Our mission is to offer our students a stimulating and creative learning programme of artistically-led acting experiences where ‘being human’ is at the heart of the work. We train actors who wish to grow through challenge and find their own creative voice and power through the craft.

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RADA

London

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Royal Birmingham Conservatoire

Birmingham

Formerly known as Birmingham School of Acting, we became part of Royal Birmingham Conservatoire in 2017. With roots as a drama school going back to 1936, we retain the professional outlook and commitment to contemporary training that has seen our drama provision consistently rated amongst the best in the UK (currently ranked as top three in the Guardian League Table 2019). We also train the associated disciplines of Stage Management and Applied Theatre, which provides the perfect learning environment to launch your career as a performance industry professional.

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Royal Central School of Speech and Drama

London

The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama is part of the University of London and is widely regarded as one of the top training institutions for those wishing to work in the performing arts. Located in Swiss Cottage, north London, the school resides within a hub of vibrant local community of arts organisations and is moments away from the prestigious, West End. Offering degrees in all areas of theatre the school offers conservatoire style training allowing students to gain hands on experience in their chosen profession. Alongside small class sizes, industry standard facilities and tutoring from some of the industry’s finest specialists, students are able to benefit from bespoke training allowing them to follow in the footsteps of graduates such as Judi Dench, Martin Freeman, Nonso Anozie, Harold Pinter and Gareth Fry.

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Royal Conservatoire of Scotland

Glasgow

The Royal Conservatoire of Scotland is consistently recognised as one of the world’s top performing arts education institutions (QS World University Rankings) endorsing its status as a national and international centre of excellence for the performing arts.

Building on our roots in 1847 as a national academy of music, we have become one of Europe’s most multi-disciplinary performing arts higher education institutions, offering specialised teaching across music, drama, dance, production, film and education. The Royal Conservatoire of Scotland works in partnership with all of the national artistic companies to provide students with the very best learning experiences the Scottish landscape has to offer. The Royal Conservatoire of Scotland is number one in Scotland for graduate employability (Higher Education Statistics Agency (2016/17) with 99.2% of graduates in employment or further education (or both) six months after graduating.

Located in the heart of Glasgow, the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland is also a busy performing arts venue; it hosts more than 600 public performances each year and welcomes an audience of more than 50,000 annually.

Graduates of the Royal Conservatoire make an impact on stage and screen, and behind the scenes, across the globe. They include Richard Madden who won Best Performance by an Actor in a Television Series - Drama for his role in BBC’s Bodyguard at this year’s Golden Globes, Laura Donnelly who was named Best Actress at the 2018 Olivier Awards for her role in The Ferryman, staged in London’s West End and on Broadway and Basia Binkowska, winner of the 2017 Linbury Prize, the UK's most prestigious award for stage design.

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Royal Welsh College of Music & Drama

Cardiff and Llanishen

The Royal Welsh College of Music & Drama is based in Cardiff. As the National Conservatoire of Wales we provide specialist vocational training within music, acting, stage management and design.

The College educates some of the most talented students from around the world, aiming to give them not just the technical and craft skills they’ll need to succeed at the top levels of the profession, but also to help them to develop their individual artistic ‘voice.’

The College’s events calendar encompasses over 500 public performances every year including orchestral concerts, recitals, drama, opera and musical theatre. The creative diversity of the college ensures a stimulating environment and broad experience for students of all disciplines.Our dedicated teachers have a wealth of professional and industry experience and the college collaborates with a number of high-profile arts organisations, including visiting artists and directors, Welsh National Opera, BBC NOW, to ensure that the unique vocational nature of our training programmes reflect the current practices and conditions of the professional world.

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