A seven-year-old from south London has secured a prestigious scholarship to one of the UK’s most elite musical institutions, marking the latest success for a church programme that has quietly been dismantling the barriers keeping working-class children out of classical music. N’raeah, from Kennington, won a fully funded chorister place at St Paul’s Cathedral School after an audition that, she said, left her unruffled. “No,” she replied, beaming, when asked if she was nervous. “Everybody’s counting on me to sing beautifully.” She is the fourth chorister from St John the Divine, Kennington (SJDK) in recent years to win a full scholarship to a leading choral foundation. Other children from the church have secured places at Westminster Abbey, King’s College, Cambridge and St John’s College, Cambridge, with several later performing at national events including the coronation of King Charles III.
St Paul’s Cathedral School, which traces its roots to AD 604 and formally established its choir school around 1123, is among the most prestigious in the country. Day fees for 2025-26 range from £7,218 per term in Reception to £7,770 per term for older years. Chorister families, however, pay £4,366 per term for boarding, with full tuition covered by the Cathedral Chapter. The Chorister Trust provides means-tested assistance of up to 100% for boarding fees, making the opportunity accessible across income levels. Since September 2025, girls have also been eligible for choristerships with full boarding provision. N’raeah’s achievement is striking given the challenges facing her local community. SJDK serves a part of Lambeth marked by high levels of deprivation and youth violence. According to the Indices of Deprivation 2025, Lambeth as a whole is more deprived than 76% of local authority districts in England, and more deprived than 98% of districts in terms of living environment and income deprivation affecting older people. The child poverty rate in the borough stands at 31%, significantly worse than the England average of 21%. Many families from migrant backgrounds have also lived through years of anxiety linked to the Windrush scandal and hostile immigration policies. The local church primary school, from which many choristers are recruited, faced closure before being saved by a fierce campaign from parents and the wider community.
A model that works for families
Yet from this corner of south London, SJDK has built one of the country’s largest youth choral programmes. Since 2013, about 1,000 children have passed through its choirs. Joe Tobin, the director of music at the church, has been instrumental in creating a model specifically designed for the area. “The great success early on was that the church was able to create a model that worked really well for this area,” Tobin said. He noted that traditional church choirs had often been formal and demanding, with families expected to organise their lives around a rigid schedule. “We really try to make it something that can work really well for families,” he said. “We pick children up from local schools and take them to rehearsal and give them snacks.”
The programme addresses the erosion of music education in local schools. Ed Picton-Turbervill, an award-winning composer, organist and keyboard teacher who works with SJDK’s youth programme, said that when the initiative began 12 years ago, every primary school he worked with had a specialist music teacher. “Now, none of those schools has a specialist music teacher,” he said. Picton-Turbervill, who was himself a scholarship pupil, is acutely aware that access to music education is increasingly tied to privilege. The team at SJDK realised early on that even a small intervention — sometimes just 15 minutes of singing a week — could help bridge gaps between privileged children and those from more deprived backgrounds.
Practical support extends beyond the rehearsal room. Picton-Turbervill recalled travelling with a young chorister and her mother to an audition in Cambridge. Meeting them at King’s Cross station, the mother told him neither of them had ever taken a train out of London before. Moments before the audition, the girl burst into tears. “I said: ‘Do you want me to come in with you for this?'” Picton-Turbervill recalled. “She said no. Then she walked in on her own to the audition. We sat outside and I just thought: wow, this is powerful. That seven-year-old has just strode confidently into her future.”
As well as meeting musical and academic demands, some children have had to overcome racial prejudice. Picton-Turbervill recounted an occasion when a person in a position of authority told him that black children could not sing the high notes. The financial support available at the scholarship institutions underscores the commitment to accessibility. At Westminster Abbey, choristers aged 8 to 13 receive an outstanding education at the Abbey Choir School with heavily subsidised fees — parents contribute to running costs, effectively covering board and lodging at £3,903.34 per term from September 2025 — while additional means-tested bursaries are available. At King’s College, Cambridge, the termly chorister figure at King’s College School is £4,164, with means-tested bursaries of up to 100% of fees for children joining Year 3 from state primary schools. At St John’s College, Cambridge — which in 2021 became the first of the major Oxbridge choirs to open its doors to girls and women from 2022 — choristers receive a bursary covering boarding fees and 50% of day school fees, plus individual singing lessons and instrumental tuition.
Pioneers of a new frontier
Picton-Turbervill describes the scholarship choristers as “pioneers”. He points to John Denny, a former mayor of Lambeth and member of the SJDK congregation, who came to Britain from Barbados in 1956, and says: “This is the next frontier of integration. These brave, talented children are opening a broader pathway for everybody.” N’raeah’s mother, Shauna-Rae, was overwhelmed when she heard her daughter had secured the place. “This is an opportunity that a lot of people from our community, our background, don’t get,” she said. She acknowledged that some families could feel hesitant about stepping into institutions historically seen as closed off to people from their backgrounds. “I was breaking that chain of thinking,” she said. While the family is musically gifted, Shauna-Rae admits the classical music her daughter sings is a world away from what she grew up with. “It’s not really my world musically, but I love that it opens different doors and different worlds for her.”
