Fourth Monkey's Digital Toolkit for Drama School Applicants

This is a new digital toolkit from Fourth Monkey Actor Training Company for drama teachers, youth theatre coordinators and young people, aimed at providing insights, advice and guidance about drama school and professional actor training.

Fourth Monkey are themselves a drama school and arts organisation based in North London and this is a very welcome resource pack that will help any drama school applicant directly, and those supporting them.

The first edition: Volume #1 – Getting Started, offers top tips for choosing the right school and training course, submitting an application, preparing for an audition, plus first-hand insights into actor training from a selection of Fourth Monkey students and alumni. There are then to be editions that investigate life at drama school and where training can take students after graduating.

I found the online pack easy to navigate and it had a combination of things I knew and would already tell my own A Level students, together with new insights. The videos featuring students at the drama school and practitioners made the whole site (and indeed drama school) feel slick and inviting. Their work on show was engaging and inspiring. The FAQ were spot-on for what I know I've been asked by students who are considering studying drama and potentially doing so at a drama school. There was a good balance between images/videos and the right amount of (but not too much) text.

Slightly frustratingly, not all editions of the resource pack are available yet, but the start is promising. My only other slight criticism is that while the Fourth Monkey online resource pack is advertised as useful for all drama school applications and auditions, it is inevitably (and understandably) subliminally encouraging applications for its own specific courses. Anyone using the pack needs therefore to take heed of the message from one of the pack's pages that there should be thorough research into several drama school options, and visits if possible, prior to application, as each one is different, even if courses seem similar.

The digital resource pack is just one aspect of Fourth Monkey's ongoing outreach commitment to making drama school and actor training increasingly accessible and inclusive – and this commitment is definitely something to be celebrated. In visiting the website, you may be inspired to book free live practice auditions and workshops for your students, which the drama school also offers.

View the arts resource pack at https://bit.ly/3xlNnnX