Performing Arts
Winner of the ‘Best of the Best’
category for Creative Arts 2025
The Week Independent Schools Guide 2025
Music
Whether you’re more SIX the musical or Beethoven’s Sixth. Putney’s music department offers an adventure into music whether you wish to play, perform, conduct or compose.
Almost half the school sings in one of our many choirs and there are countless music clubs to try from orchestras to rock bands. Well over half of all pupils learn at least one instrument.
State-of-the-art facilities include acoustically engineered practice rooms, spacious performance areas, a recording studio and a composition room.
Leavers regularly go on to Music at Oxbridge and the Royal Academy of Music
Drama
Performance is an integral part of life at Putney and there are opportunities to tread the boards in a busy calendar of shows throughout the year. Behind the scenes there are LAMDA classes and training in the technical aspects of theatre production using the state-of-the-art equipment and a professional sound and lighting booth.
Workshops and stage-craft masterclasses are led by stars of stage and screen and numerous theatre trips provide inspiration for our students’ own critically acclaimed performances at the Edinburgh Fringe and the Shakespeare Schools Festival.
"Music at the epicentre of the school."
The Good Schools Guide
It’s rare that a school fosters such individual creative merit.
Performance Opportunities
Putney Poetry Festival
Anyone who has sat in the Performing Arts Centre, listening to our poets from Year 7 to Year 13 perform their poems, has felt the magic of the Putney High School Poetry Festival. Each year students across the school are invited to create an original poem. From hundreds of entries, around 50 finalists are selected to perform their work on stage.
Dance Show
Our annual Dance Show showcases ballet, contemporary, street dance and jazz.
Putney Performs
Budding pianists and vocalists perform to an audience of their peers in this impressive showcase of musical talent.
The Arts play an important part in the life of the school both as academic disciplines in their own right and for the creative expression and cultural value they bring to our community.
