A school matinee ticket in London can cost ten pounds. Not a special one-off, not a raffle, an actual price that productions set aside for schools, and I have spent the last twenty years arranging them. If you teach drama or English and you have written off a West End trip because you assumed it would be forty pounds a head plus a coach, then I can help you. There is a whole system for this and hardly anybody outside the industry knows it exists.
It is a weekday daytime performance where the house is filled with school groups.
That matters more than it sounds. Your students are not the only teenagers in a room full of people who paid eighty pounds and would like them to be quiet. Everybody there is roughly their age, on a school trip, reacting the way teenagers react. I have watched the same show with a paying evening audience and with a schools house, and they are not the same event. The schools one is louder and considerably better.
Because the whole performance is built around school groups, the productions price it for schools. Ten pounds a ticket can often be a struggle for many schools to afford but with the added extras, the teachers see the positive impact of creative careers.
This is the part teachers don’t expect, and it is the bit that turns a nice day out into something from which they can gain content and content for their lessons back in school.
On the productions I work on, the ticket is only part of it. There is sometimes a workshop delivered in your school beforehand, built specifically for that production rather than being generic, and delivered by professional facilitators. I come into the school with them, meet the teachers and students, and ensure everything runs smoothly throughout the session.
Then after the show there is a post-show Q&A with the entire company and front of house team. And, my favourite part of this entire job, a post show demonstration from the lighting, sound and stage management team.
I will tell you why that last one matters. Every time, you watch a handful of students realise that stage management is a job. That someone gets paid to run that desk, that a career in theatre is not only for the people who can sing, and that it might be available to them. I have seen a young person’s face light up during a technical demo and that is worth the whole trip to me.
Because somebody has to sit between the school and the production, and it can be harder than it looks.
Productions are not set up to talk to thirty schools individually, and teachers do not have time to chase a producer’s education department. So I do it. I am the contact in both directions, which means the teacher has one person to email and the production has one person accountable for whether the seats are filled and the workshops happen.
Practically, that means I handle the booking, brief the facilitators, get into the schools with them, sit at the back taking notes, deal with whatever comes up on the day, and meet the production’s education team every fortnight to keep it all on track. If a coach is late or a group size changes, you ring me and not a box office queue.
On the productions I work on, that coordination is paid for by the production rather than by you, because filling a matinee is totally worth money to them.
Very little, and you can send it in one email.
Your contact details, roughly how many students, what year group, which subject and syllabus if there is one, and the term you are thinking about. That really is enough for me to tell you what is available and what it will cost. If you have a specific show in mind, say so and I will tell you whether there is a schools offer on it, because sometimes there isn’t. Shows like Hamilton have always been exceptionally well received, which is fabulous becaus I love this show!
Autumn and spring are the busy terms and the popular matinee allocations fill up very quickly, so it is worth asking sooner rather than closer to the date.
I should also say, in case it is the thing stopping you: I work with schools where a forty pound trip is simply not happening, and where some families will struggle with ten pounds. This is a normal conversation to have with me and it is worth asking, because what is possible really does vary from show to show.
Schools programmes are a large part of my consultancy work.
If you have matinees to fill, or an education strategy that looks good on paper and is not reaching the schools you hoped it would, this is what I do. I bring the school relationships, manage the workshop delivery, and stay accountable for the seats. II’ve been doing this for twenty years on major West End musicals, and I’ve collaborated with several West End producers and marketers on current shows.
Whether you are a teacher or a producer, please get in touch to tell me what you are trying to achieve and how I can support you.
