group of children celebrate Bradford winning UK City of Culture. they are jumping up and down, shouting, and holding banners saying 'our time, our place'

Bradford won the race to become UK City of Culture 2025 last year

Photo: Karol Wyszynski

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Bid for creative school in Bradford submitted to DfE

Proposals submitted to establish a new school in Bradford offering 16 to 19 year olds specialist creative education.

Patrick Jowett
3 min read

The music industry's trade association has submitted a bid to the Department for Education’s (DfE) free schools funding process to open a specialist creative college in Bradford.

Provisionally titled BRIT School North, the proposal, being led by the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) is inspired by the BRIT School in Croydon and has been designed to increase opportunities to study a creative education in West Yorkshire and the surrounding region.

The school’s planned vocational curriculum would be free to attend and aimed at young people aged 16 to 19 looking to pursue a career in the creative sector, offering both performance and skills-based subjects across music, theatre, digital design and production arts.

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There have been more than 60 proposals to the latest round of DfE’s free schools fund, known as Wave-15, with a total of 15 bids set to receive support. If BRIT School North is among those successful, it would be on a projected course to open in 2026.

Three major record companies – Sony Music, Universal Music and Warner Music – and the BRIT School, Day One, East London Arts & Music and the London Screen Academy have all pledged to offer links to the wider creative industries, with the three record label also set to contribute additional funding to put towards state-of-the-art equipment.

The BPI believes bringing the school to Bradford, which will become the UK’s next City of Culture in 2025, would help to deliver on the city's legacy commitment of its City of Culture status and contribute to Bradford’s 10-year cultural strategy.

The proposal has received support from Mayor of West Yorkshire Tracy Brabin, who said she is thrilled Bradford had been selected as the preferred location for the school.

“West Yorkshire is the place to be when it comes to culture and creativity – now so more than ever as we draw closer to Bradford’s year in the spotlight,” she said.

“With vibrant musical venues in abundance, and even more in the pipeline, our region is well and truly cementing its place on the world stage as a creative and cultural hotspot.”

BPI Chair YolanDa Brown said the BPI is looking forward to building on the sucess of the BRIT School model “to give a greater number of young people from across the North of England an opportunity to pursue a career in the creative industries”.

“Bradford already has a wonderfully vibrant cultural and creative scene. We are very excited about the benefits of this partnership and how we can contribute to Bradford’s ambitions, but also how this school can continue our work to diversify our talent pipeline by ‘levelling-up’ opportunity, both geographically and socio-economically,” she added.