This article was originally published in our Winter 2024 issue. Click here to subscribe to our quarterly print magazine and be the first to read our Summer 2025 issue features.

It seems so obvious when you think about it. On the one hand, our orchestras and concert series need support with running costs now more than ever. If ensembles want funding, they often need to demonstrate that they ‘reach and engage people and communities’ (the Arts Council includes ‘students’ in its definition of ‘communities’). On the other hand, our schools are in desperate need of input from arts specialists, and are keen to provide ‘cultural capital’ for students.

Why not, as an orchestra or arts provider, simply base yourself in a school? In the UK education eco-system, the private sector is vastly wealthier than the state sector and has an opportunity to share resources. Here are three such ventures that are benefitting both financially and artistically from a collaborative arrangement.

Orchestra of the Swan and Warwick Schools Foundation

In 2023, the Orchestra of the Swan (OOTS) relocated from the Stratford PlayHouse to the Warwick Schools Foundation campus, under the banner of creating a ‘centre of musical excellence across the county’. The ensemble is a lottery-funded charity and pays a subsidised rent, while receiving funding from the school for its educational ventures (a small part of its wide-ranging activities). Warwick Schools Foundation is the governing body for five fee-paying independent schools: Warwick Preparatory School, King’s High School, Warwick Junior School, Warwick Senior School and The Kingsley School. The campus has what might be referred to in Westminster as ‘broad shoulders’, and, as part of its extensive suite of arts facilities, in 2016 updated the ‘much-loved but outgrown’ Guy Nelson Hall into the new £7.4m ‘Warwick Hall’.

‘The idea of the partnership is that we not only promote Warwick Hall, but that we also work within the foundation. Their remit is to share the fantastic facilities that are on the foundation campus with the wider Warwickshire School community,’ says OOTS’s managing director Debbie Jagla.

‘The foundation has appointed an executive music lead so that we have a liaison point between us and the five schools. That role works in partnership with the Warwickshire, Solihull and Coventry music hubs to be sure that all of the advantages that are given to Foundation pupils are shared with the wider state school network.’

OOTS’s primary offering is three concerts per year in Warwick Hall, rehearsals for which are open to local students. ‘We invite primary and secondary schools to send their students,’ says Jagla. ‘One primary school sent ninety children to a rehearsal’.

There is also a programme of ‘side by side’ concerts, where secondary level students from within the Foundation will join the orchestra on stage. Further ways in which OOTS is reaching out to the wider school network include workshops and masterclasses in Warwickshire’s primary and secondary schools, and separate ‘come and play’ days for schools across the county. It is also setting up ‘The Swan Youth Orchestra’, featuring two weekend courses per year for performers at Grade 6 and above. ‘The Warwickshire music hub doesn’t have its own orchestra, so we are working in partnership with them to try to create one,’ says Jagla.

Golden threads: ‘The riches that are gleaned from this investment are enormous’ © Roger King

Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and Acland Burghley School

The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment (OAE), also a lottery-funded charity, has for several years now been resident at Acland Burghley School, a mixed state secondary school in the London borough of Camden with specialist status as an arts college.

Headteacher Nicholas John described the scheme’s origins: ‘We met each other in 2020, pre-Covid. On about meeting five or six, there was a penny-drop moment where we realised that this wasn’t going to work by half measures.’ The school identified a suitable part of its building that could host the orchestra, adjacent to its assembly hall, and the OAE paid to have it refurbished. ‘The ensemble pays a rental fee,’ says John. ‘That is money that wouldn’t otherwise have been coming in and goes directly into teaching.

‘Being close to an arts organisation that has excellence at its very core is an inspiration to a school. Everyone is influenced by the way they work – the attention to detail, the implicit pursuit of excellence in what they do.’

Large-scale projects in the partnership include Breaking Bach – a collaboration with the school’s dance department – and the community opera The Moon Hares, by writer Hazel Gould and composer James Redwood, which saw children with significant additional needs from Acland Burghley School performing alongside the OAE and a community choir. ‘They gave students the professional training that you would get with an elite sports club or drama society,’ says John.

Day-to-day involvement includes live music in assemblies, encounter sessions, and workshops with whole year groups. There is also a concert club with discounted entry for the Acland Burghley community and free student access. The orchestra’s intervention at Year 11 has had what John describes as a ‘significant effect’ on the pass rate at Music GCSE.

Keen to continue the collaboration in the long term, John says, ‘Something I hadn’t really realised when they came in was that they are a really experienced educational setup in their own right and they know the local community already. There is no doubt about it: having an orchestra in your school causes you to have to reorganise some things – use of space, safeguarding, and so on – but the riches that are gleaned from this investment in a flexible approach are enormous.’

Saffron Hall and Saffron Walden County High School

Saffron Hall, a critically acclaimed international 740- seat performance space that hosts residencies with the Britten Sinfonia and the London Philharmonic Orchestra, is built within the grounds of Saffron Walden County High School, a co-educational academy state secondary school.

The Hall was built by a local philanthropist and opened in 2013. The gift, which was over £10m, was reported at the time to be the largest private donation ever made to a British state school. Significantly, even though the school owns the Hall, the building was put under the control of an independent charity, the Saffron Hall Trust. The Trust’s CEO Angela Dixon explains this setup: ‘It was enshrined in the grant agreement that a certain amount of time in the hall must be given to public performance. Saffron Hall Trust has a licence to be in the Hall from Friday to Sunday and in school holidays. The school has no control over that time. From Monday to Thursday the school has control

of the building, and they do normal school things: exams, parents’ evenings, school concerts. The school looks after the overheads and the fabric of the building – things like leaks in the roof – and we run the public programme and a big schools and community programme.’

The Hall’s school and community programme is extensive and reaches out to schools across the region, as well as its host, integrating the talent that comes to the hall with the local education network. ‘We recently had [saxophonist and composer] YolanDa Brown in, and we invited 800 primary school children to do a schools concert with her before she did the evening concert,’ says Dixon. ‘Young people performed in each of the three concerts within our birthday weekend. On Friday, we had a jazz concert with Juliet Kelly, on the Saturday the English Concert with Harry Bicket were joined at the end of their concert by the school’s chamber choir as the chorus for Handel’s Rodelinda, and on the Sunday we had Jess Gillam with the Britten Sinfonia. We run a Saturday morning music school here in partnership with Essex Music Education Hub, and a group of kids from that music school performed with Jess at the start of the second half. We are often commissioned by Essex Music Education Hub to deliver workshops and various other things. We have had The Sixteen in the building and Harry Christophers has nipped over to the music school to take a choir rehearsal. That sort of thing happens quite a lot.’

Another way in which Saffron Hall is unlike many other venues is that it receives no funding. Not from the school, the Arts Council, the local authority, or the county. It is entirely self-financing and needs to raise, says Dixon, around £900k each year. ‘Ticket sales are high, and we are supported through a membership scheme and sponsorship for our concerts and community work. We are crowdfunded in a sense, in that the community feels great ownership.’