Help support young musicians after the Junior RWCMD closure

We are teachers from the former junior department of the Royal Welsh College of Music. On 19th July 2024 we were told the department was being closed down for financial reasons, leaving hundreds of young musicians without the expert teaching, mentorship and community they have been able to access in Cardiff for the past 25 years.

Accessing funding for music education can be a challenge in the UK, and Wales is a particularly difficult place to get support for your musical education if you are a child hoping to progress to the higher levels, perhaps to university or music college. The National Music and Dance Scheme provides up to £3000 of funding a year for able students to attend one of the seven conservatoire junior departments in England, where there are also three specialist music schools. Scotland has one full time school, and a similar funding programme for its conservatoire junior department. Children in Wales receive none of this, and we have no specialist schools. Until recently, the RWCMD offered generous bursaries to many of its young students, enabling them to attend the junior department at little or no cost to them. All of this ended when the department was closed, leaving many students unable to afford their future tuition.

Determined not to let our students down, we formed a new music school, originally titled the Junior Music Conservatoire of Wales (because we aspire to bring our high level music education to all talented students in Wales, in time). We have now gone into partnership with CF Music (the music service for Cardiff & Vale, part of the National Music Service), who are adding their expertise and administration skills to our package to create the best possible provision for the children left behind by the college closure, and other young people who may wish to access a musical education of this level in Cardiff in the future. What we are lacking is a means of supporting those students who will struggle to pay our course fees (which are a third lower than they were at RWCMD).

We want to be able to offer bursaries to those children who may otherwise struggle to access our music school - now named Young Musician's Academi - but we lack the finances to do so. We would appreciate any donations, however modest, to enable more talented young people to develop their musical skills through our decades of experience and expertise. Our target of £2000 would provide a 50% bursary to six students for the first term.

We are so grateful for any support you can offer.