Rehearsed every week. Performed all year.
The arts are built into the timetable at Aldergate.
Pupils rehearse, perform, exhibit, direct, compose, design and work behind the scenes throughout the year. Music and drama can be studied to examination level, while opportunities to take part begin much earlier.
Six hundred lessons a week.
Every First Form pupil learns an instrument. Around two-thirds continue beyond their first year.
Forty visiting teachers provide individual tuition, most of them practising musicians.
There are two orchestras, a Chapel Choir, chamber choir, big band, jazz combo and numerous smaller ensembles.
The Symphony Orchestra performs three concerts each year, including one in a cathedral. The Chapel Choir tours in the summer.
Music scholars receive lessons on two instruments alongside a weekly seminar with the Director of Music.
A theatre run by pupils.
The 300-seat Whitcombe Theatre is used throughout the year and pupils are involved in everything from lighting and sound to box office and backstage production.
There are three main productions each year, alongside House plays directed entirely by the Upper Sixth.
Drama is offered at GCSE and A level. LAMDA examinations are available to all pupils.
Room, time and materials.
The art school occupies a converted stable block with north light in every studio.
Pupils draw from life from the First Form. By the Sixth Form, they have access to individual studio space, a printmaking press, ceramics kiln and darkroom.
The summer exhibition fills the Great Hall and is open to the local community.
Recent leavers have progressed to the Slade, Ruskin, Glasgow School of Art and architecture at Bath.
The Michaelmas programme
Parents are welcome at performances and exhibitions. Tickets are free and usually go quickly.
The concert is the least important hour of the week. It is the other ten that change them.
Mr Tobias Renshaw, Director of Music