After Choir School

Being a chorister provides a superb musical training, but it also supports strong academic development, self-motivation and learning as well as helping to forge friendships that last a lifetime.  

Once they have come to the end of the five year programme, some choristers choose a musical pathway and audition for an Instrumentalist place at St Mary’s Music School while others choose to complete their secondary education at their local school or elsewhere. Due to their excellent musical training, choristers regularly win S3 Music Scholarships to oher schools. 

Whatever their choice, music often remains a significant and much appreciated part of life. 

"As a chorister at St Mary's I learnt everything I have needed in my life. Not just the rigorous musical education or the broad repertoire of lifelong choral favourites that you pick up along the way (the Brahms Deutsche Requiem, The St John Passion, Herbert Howells Coll Reg canticles: every one of these transports me straight back to a gloriously happy period of my life at St Mary's), but much more importantly it's where I was patiently turned from being a raggedy hopeless schoolboy into being a disciplined and professional performer.

There are profound memories of my time as a chorister there that I still draw on and which still - more than thirty years later - inspire and nourish me. Ridiculous though it may sound, I think my life was turned around and made remarkable by being a chorister, any success I have enjoyed I put down entirely to that."

Alexander Armstrong, Comedian, Actor, Television Presenter and Singer and former Chorister