The Royal Conservatoire of Scotland is a national and international centre of excellence for performing arts education.

Building on our roots in 1847 as a national academy of music, we are now one of the world’s most multi-disciplinary conservatoires, offering specialised and intensive teaching in dance, drama, music, production and film.

Currently, more than 1000 students are pursuing undergraduate and postgraduate degrees at RCS across all of our specialisms. We also teach over 2000 part-time learners each year through our Junior Conservatoire and Lifelong Learning department, opening up access to the arts to children, young people and adult learners.

Located in the heart of Glasgow city centre, RCS is also a busy performing arts centre with more than 500 public performances taking place across our five professional venues each year. We welcome over 40,000 members of the public every academic year, to watch our talented and passionate students perform on stage.

Please use this website to find out more about the Royal Conservatoire here you will find information about all of our programmes, summer schools, widening access programmes, performances and hopefully learn what it’s like to really be a student here at RCS. We invite you to look at the Digital Hub in particular to find out more about what makes RCS distinctive and like nowhere else.

Want to know more?
The Marketing and Communications department love to chat about all things RCS. If you’ve got a question, please contact them at communications@rcs.ac.uk and a member of the team will respond to you shortly.

Welcome to the next generation of professionals

Our vision is that Royal Conservatoire of Scotland graduates will enrich the performing arts with new work and will create the future of performance for generations to come. Our curriculum is designed to make that happen.

We believe that a conservatoire should provide much more than an intensive, demanding education: the conservatoire experience is one of total immersion where you can discover and develop your optimum potential.

The Royal Conservatoire is Scotland’s national centre of professional vocational training in performance arts. Our location is the heart of Glasgow; our orientation is the contemporary international scene. We are leading the way as one of Europe’s top conservatoires, offering a rare breadth of artistic disciplines.

Everything we do is driven by our desire for excellence. At the Royal Conservatoire we provide everything students need to excel at their chosen discipline and go beyond their artistic voice. Students flourish thanks to the extraordinary blend of intensive tuition, a rigorous performance schedule, working with professional counterparts, and the space to create with others across the disciplines.

Highly vocational training

We offer outstanding specialist learning to the highest professional level in our undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in dance, drama, music, production, screen and education. Our training is rigorous and inextricably linked to the professions. We also nurture talent at all stages and ages with a wide variety of courses from weekly sessions to specialist summer schools.

Our students

First and foremost, our students train to achieve excellence in every way in their chosen specialism. But they are also exposed to a rich variety of influences, approaches and attitudes, from one another and through the wealth of experiences we ensure they encounter at the Conservatoire. Our new artists are being prepared to become a dynamic part of the creative communities they join.

Our facilities – amongst the best in Europe

We believe our facilities are amongst the best in Europe. They include six professional performance venues; a high ratio of practice rooms per student; three recording studios; percussion studios; professional stage technology; four bespoke dance studios; new studios for technical, design, scenic art, set-building and costume design and construction.

We are based right in the centre of Glasgow. We have occupied our home at Renfrew Street, just behind Glasgow’s famous Sauchiehall Street since 1987. Our six performance spaces and most of our programme facilities are located here, as well as a very busy café bar, where students from across the disciplines meet throughout the day. In 2011 we expanded our facilities and opened our state of the art dance, production and ensemble rehearsal studios, The Wallace Studios, joining Scottish Opera and the National Theatre of Scotland. It is just a ten-minute walk from Renfrew Street. In May 2014, phase two of this development opened with eight new large multi-purpose ensemble studios, apt for all our specialisms and trans-disciplinary work, keeping our facilities ahead of our contemporaries. All these are backed up by the latest IT and digital technologies.

Our Conservatoire in Scotland’s artistic heart

Our location in the heart of Glasgow on Scotland’s west coast is a great advantage. Scotland has a rich artistic heritage and Glasgow is famed across the globe as a city of culture. The city is home to many of the national performing companies, including Scottish Opera, the National Theatre of Scotland and Scottish Ballet, which are just a few streets away from the Conservatoire. Our student body is part of the 80,000 strong student population of the city and this is something Glasgow has embraced. Glasgow is a student friendly city.

Excellent transport links makes it easy to reach most of the European capitals by plane or train and travelling around the city couldn’t be easier with public transport in abundance.

“One of the things I loved not only about the Royal Conservatoire but Scotland and, specifically Glasgow, was this human grit that I’ve never found in any other place I’ve ever been – this real sort of existential beauty in very difficult things to look at… a stark gorgeous aesthetic that I think really challenged my boundaries about what I considered to be palatable.”

Alexandra Silber, Actor and Musical Theatre performer