On Friday 24 February 2023, the Haberdashers' Company was proud to present its very first Schools' Music Festival. 

This event is part of the Worshipful Company of Haberdashers’ Character programme - cultural, civic and skills building activities for our schools. Haberdashers are proud to include schools of all types and sizes within the family of schools – from brand new state academies to centuries’ old independent schools. Haberdashers’ wider aspiration is to empower young people from every background and enable them to flourish.

We are very grateful to Habs Boys for hosting and organising our first festival concert that brought all our London schools, from Elstree and Haberdashers’ Academy Trust South, together to celebrate music. In future years we expect to include our Monmouth and Haberdashers’ West Midlands Academy Trust schools and travel around the country to share music across the whole schools’ community.

The event was a resounding success, with the music the students performed ranging from Cole Porter to Mozart, Dvorak to Marvin Gaye. In addition to the evening programme, a group of students from across all schools spent the afternoon taking part in a Samba workshop. Working with Mr Ormston, the group gathered to prepare for its massed item of Stevie Wonder’s ‘Another Star’. It was a truly wonderful afternoon of community music making.

See and hear for yourself, by watching the video, here: https://vimeo.com/813566829