When Simon Larter-Evans was a youngster growing up in Harlow, Essex, his mum took him to the local theatre once a week, where they would sometimes catch dance performances.
He soon became “transfixed” by ballet, and was attending daily and weekend classes at the same time as attending his local “sprawling comprehensive”.
While school was miserable, dancing provided him with a space to “be myself” he says.
He eventually went on to follow a career in dance, leaving home at age 16 to attend a cutting-edge dance school in Brussels. He then joined the renowned Rambert Academy and went on to become a touring professional.
It is perhaps no surprise then to find him – decades later – as the principal of one of the country’s foremost performing arts schools – Tring Park in Hertfordshire.
“What they do on stage is breathtakingly good – there’s nothing like it.”
The school, one of eight part-funded by the Government’s Music and Dance Scheme, is a vocational independent school offering specialist performing arts education alongside a full academic curriculum.
For young people aged 7 to 19, it offers day and boarding education to 360 students, who are selected on their performing, rather than academic ability.
And he is delighted with his latest role – a real highlight, he says is “walking about the place and just feeling it”.
“You walk in the main door, it’s a visually spectacular environment, you’ve probably got a tap dancing class in one studio, you can hear harmony singing in another room, and there’s a group of other children sitting in a huddle revising for something and it’s all happening around you. It has an extraordinary sense of life about it,” he says.
“The pupils are focused because they’re passionately interested in what they’re doing and they want to be successful and they support each other…they are inherently interested in the collective success of what they do.
“What they do on stage is breathtakingly good – there’s nothing like it,” he adds.
“I couldn’t believe my luck when the job came up.”
His previous roles reflect a love of working in arts-focused schools. His most recent post was seven years running St Paul’s Cathedral School where he saw through an £8m investment in its estate and a period as head of English and boarding at the world-famous Yehudi Menhuin School in Surrey.
“When Tring Park came up – and it’s a school that I’ve had my eye on for a long long time – I couldn’t believe my luck,” he says.
But how does a teenage dancer from Harlow become a school principal? Larter-Evans’ portfolio career is an unusual one to say the least. His career in dance ended in his mid-20s (“I never retired, I just found other things to do”) and he went into media sales and technology marketing for around 15 years.
At aged 40, he became an undergraduate for the first time, studying English and drama at Roehampton University with a plan to become a teacher. He studied for a PGCE at the Institute of Education in London.
His early career took him into disadvantaged London schools where, he says, staff were often “more social workers than teachers”. Staff also had to find out what made students tick in order to teach them effectively, he says.
“It was an extraordinary place to learn your craft and learn about people,” he says. “I learnt very quickly to find out where students’ hinterland is”.
These days, his skills are put to good use honing the schools’ wellbeing work – stage schools can be competitive and pressured places for obvious reasons.
“We’re really alive to it – they’re long days, it is a demanding day, we’re not shy of that,” he says.
“The pastoral piece has to be really well thought through… There’s always room for improving, we are not complacent,” he adds.
“The academic programme is not about providing a ‘Plan B’ if students don’t make it.”
Managing parental concerns, especially from those who have no performing arts background themselves, also requires maximum people skills.
He also insists that the academic programme at the school is not about providing students with a “Plan B” if their arts career flounders.
“It’s about making sure that young artists have as much richness in their lives so that they can become better artists. We’re nurturing that kind of performer.”
Equally, the academic grounding does allow students to have portfolio careers like his own, where performing arts might be just one aspect.
As he settles into the job, Larter-Evans is investigating how the school can make a wider contribution to young people’s access to arts education.
He is concerned about a “cultural resistance” that signals to under-represented groups that the performing arts are “not for them”. This is then reinforced by a trend for schools to sideline the arts in favour of STEM subjects.
“We’ve moved into this Pisa-style league table thing and I just think that’s a desperate shame.”
He says: “Central education policy has moved to a sort of utilitarian instrumentalist type of education that is very clearly linked to economic output.
“I don’t want to blame Gove, even Blair’s ‘Education Education Education’ – premised on this idea that you credentialise your schooling experience so you come out the other end with a certificate that is then your ticket to a better job – massively undermines what an education is.
“This is not just in the UK- right across the western world, we’ve moved into this Pisa style league-table thing and I just think that’s a desperate shame. There’s more to education than that, you have the old maxim, education for a life, not a living.”
Automation through AI will mean that culture and “what it means to be human” will be more vital than ever, he says.
He adds: “That’s not decrying science, the scientific world and the artistic world have more to say to each other than perhaps we give credit.”
He is not a fan of the idea of specialist STEM schools, however. “You’re cutting children off from seeing the other side of their own lives,” he says.
“The more the arts are diminished, it becomes even more challenging to create those opportunities.”
He says that Tring Park is now “much more overtly” considering how it can create access points for under represented young people to experience the arts and “helping them to feel that it’s for them”.
“But we can’t do that on our own,” he says. “The problem is that the more the arts are diminished, it becomes even more challenging to create those opportunities because you’re fighting against a cultural thing.”
“We’re working on that gently, it’s early days for me.
“Some of our challenges are how do we persuade the trusts and foundations that we’re really well set up to give under-represented young people a cracking chance at an amazing industry.”
He would like to see specialist independent performing arts providers able to receive local authority funding in the same way they support SEN students in independent schools.
“If we could move toward that then happy days, then it becomes absolutely egalitarian and it’s based on talent.
“Wouldn’t it be great if we were just here to provide academic and vocational education to very talented people regardless of their means?”