The Royal Ballet School

The Royal Ballet School was founded in 1926 by Dame Ninette de Valois as the training school of what became the Royal Ballet at Covent Garden. The school operates today across two sites: the Lower School at White Lodge in Richmond Park (the eighteenth-century Georgian royal hunting lodge built for George I) for ages 11-16, and the Upper School at Covent Garden (immediately adjacent to the Royal Opera House) for ages 16-19. The school educates around 220 pupils with substantial boarding at White Lodge. The Artistic Director is Christopher Powney.

The Royal Ballet School is one of the four UK DfE-recognised performing-arts schools (with the Yehudi Menuhin School, Tring Park, and Wells Cathedral School for music). Almost all pupils attend on substantial Music and Dance Scheme scholarships funded by the Department for Education.

The school's alumnae include the defining English ballerinas of the twentieth century: Dame Margot Fonteyn DBE — prima ballerina assoluta of the Royal Ballet, whose decades-long partnership with Rudolf Nureyev (from 1962) is the most internationally famous ballet partnership in history; and Dame Darcey Bussell DBE — Principal of the Royal Ballet from 1989 to 2007 and later the Strictly Come Dancing judge through whom contemporary British audiences encounter ballet. The choreographer Sir Kenneth MacMillan was a Royal Ballet School graduate.