Traditionally students who could act did lots of work in school and/or youth theatre and/or extra-curricular classes. Then they applied for three year training at drama school and, if they were good enough, got in.

But thousands of hopefuls were turned down, as they still are. In some cases they were never going to be up to the mark and really should do something else. But others had potential but too little experience to audition successfully - perhaps because they hadn’t had the right guidance and advice.

So along came full-time foundation courses to prepare wannabes for drama school. And the last twenty years has seen a huge expansion in these courses - both from independent providers and from the drama schools themselves.

Having seen many such courses in action, talked to many students who’ve done them and last week visited Read College in Reading, which specialises in foundation courses, I’ve been pondering the pros, cons and issues.

Creative Choices - the new name for Offstage Choices - has gone from strength to strength since Creative and Cultural Skills launched the programme in 2009 with just a handful of events. And that’s very good news because it is helping to get performing arts careers to school students - something that does not happen enough, as I point out regularly.

This term, some of England’s major theatres and live music venues will open their doors to an estimated 19,000 school children in years 9, 10 and 11 (13-16 year olds), to demonstrate the wealth of career opportunities available in offstage and backstage roles.

So Education Secretary Michael Gove, carefully flanked by Nick Clegg for political expediency, has announced the replacement of GCSE with English Baccalaureate Certificates (EBC) initially in Maths, English and Sciences.

So where does that leave performance subjects such as drama, dance and music and what effect will the proposed changes have on the status of the performing arts in the curriculum?

Frankly, howls of outrage from performing arts teachers and the related industries notwithstanding, I don’t think it will affect them much at all. It could even be the making of them. And I have a number of reasons.

I’ve written here before about the recent spate of imaginative, abridged Shakespeare versions designed to draw children in — but it’s a topic worth revisiting. One strand of the RSC’s famous and succinct three-line Shakespeare Manifesto is ‘Start it earlier’ and it’s an idea which is being taken more and more seriously.

Last week, for example, I saw and reviewed for The Stage the latest in the RSC’s Young People’s Shakespeare (YPS) series. This time, under Tim Crouch’s imaginative direction, it was an 80 minute King Lear pared down to a family drama over Christmas and intended mainly for primary school children. Until very recently few people would have considered Lear as workable for children in any shape or form. Kids, of course, can cope with far more than most of us think they can and most of the 8 and 9 year olds in the audience were riveted.

Last week I opined that there are too many drama schools producing too many students who have no hope of ever getting work in an already saturated industry. And having raised my head above the parapet, I was quite surprised how many people actually “came out” and said they agree with me.

Nonetheless, just occasionally, a new vocational school starts which really does seem to break the mould by attracting good numbers, enrolling real talent and producing graduates who get plenty of work. Such a school is the Musical Theatre Academy, founded in 2009 by Annemarie Lewis Thomas and which won the 2012 School of the Year in the Stage 100 Awards.

The latest mark of MTA’s success is that, as of this week, it has been granted charitable status.

I meet hundreds of drama students every year. And I often travel all over the country to meet them on home turf in their colleges as well as observing them at showcases in London.

The thing which strikes me about them as a group is their extraordinary work ethic. They attend rigorous energetic classes all day and often work far into the evening - especially if there’s a show on. “I went back to the flat I share with some other uni students the other day at lunch time to collect something I’d forgotten” and incredulous Manchester School of Theatre student told me recently. “And the others were still in their pyjamas!”

That’s the trouble, I suppose, with opting for a subject which gives you a handful of teaching hours per week and an awful lot of unspoken for time. Drama students, in accredited schools, get 30 hours minimum so they’re busy all day every day.

My first encounter with the Shakespeare’s Globe education department was more than 20 years ago when I took a party of Kent schoolgirls to London for a day with the charismatic Patrick Spottiswoode. He has been leading learning on Bankside from the very beginning when Shakespeare’s Globe itself was still just a determined twinkle in the ageing Sam Wanamaker’s eye. Spottiswoode joined the Globe in 1984 and became its Director of Education in 1989 — although the iconic thatched building wasn’t opened by the Queen until 1997, four years after Wanamaker’s death.

They started the Education department in advance almost as a symbol of what was planned for the future — and happen it did. The girls and I looked at exhibits and enjoyed a wonderful, unforgettable workshop with Patrick in a building a few yards from where The Globe now stands in all its glory.

I rather like rhetorical triplets, as in “I came, I saw, I conquered” or Birds, Beasts and Relatives, the title of a Gerald Durrell book). Not that the three items in my triplet today are connected, other than all being loosely linked to training.

First, the book. I have to confess that I know precious little about jazz, so it was with interest that I turned to The Jazz Standards: a Guide to the Repetoire by Ted Gioia (Oxford, published in the UK on September 27) when it landed unbidden on my desk, as books tend to.

And fascinating, informative stuff it is too. Gioia lists lots of songs and numbers, alphabetically from After You’ve Gone to You’d Be Nice to Come Home To. For each one he writes an article — upbeat, sparky and not in the least earnest — about the piece’s genesis and development and the versions it has been performed in as well as listing the recordings available. I was particularly taken with the information about songs such as Somewhere over the Rainbow and Someday My Prince which, of course, didn’t start life as jazz numbers but attracted the attention of jazz performers. So it’s definitely a training book. There’s a lot of useful information here for singers and music theatre students.

As hundreds of thousands of children and young people flock back to school this week I’m wondering who is going to give the ones who are in love with the performing arts the advice they so sorely need.

The only thing the average parent (unless he or she works in the industry - and most of those also try to deter their children from following the family tradition) knows about being an actor is that you spend most of your time out of work.

Some secondary schools have big drama departments staffed by people active, or recently active, in the industry who can tell and show the students what’s what. In those same schools — and I’ve seen it in the maintained as well as the independent sector — there is often a professional standard theatre for students to work in. But the sad truth is that most schools do not have such facilities or give the performing arts the priority they deserve. Drama is still, far too often, taught as a minor adjunct of English - or worse, lumped in with dance, and relegated to the PE department.

And that means that the keen student’s source of advice is an English or PE teacher whose own experience begins and ends with having seen/read a few plays and had a spear-carrying role in a student production of Macbeth in 1988.

Britain has some of the finest performing arts training establishments in the world - the 22, including, Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, RWCMD, LAMDA, Guildhall School of Music and Drama and the like, which belong to Drama UK, formerly CDS — and many others. So it’s no coincidence that we also produce some of the world’s most outstanding theatre — as the recent Olympics and Paralympics Opening Ceremonies helped to highlight.

But surely there has to be a saturation point? I suspect we are now training far more performers than the relevant industries could ever absorb, even if every trainee were of star quality.

I’ve been chatting to Russell Scott, who founded New Talent Spotlight three years ago.

He works with singers in the early stages of their careers who are still trying to get a break. Paid (modestly) for their work, these performers take part in professional shows which Scott produces. He sees his role as that of a talent scout. “We are not an agency and it’s not a competition,” he says. His website describes New Talent Spotlight as “the independent UK talent platform for emerging musical theatre professionals.”

We all know that there are talented performers coming out of training establishments who need to — and should be — noticed, but often are not. So Scott’s idea seems rather a good one to me, and he certainly seems to impress the people who see him in action.

I was an Olympics sceptic but some of my misgivings were evidently misplaced. Here’s an example of the Olympics legacy influencing a youth employment scheme to help young unemployed people find work in the arts and creative industries.

Led by the Royal Opera House, The Creative Jobs Programme is giving 40 unemployed young people aged 18 to 24 the opportunity to undertake six months’ paid work at one of the organisations involved in the Cultural Olympiad. 23 London organisations are involved in CJP, including Arcola Theatre, East London Dance, English National Opera, Hackney Empire, Royal Opera House, Sadler’s Wells and Theatre Royal Stratford East.

The scheme was launched at the end of May to coincide with the London 2012 Festival and it runs until the end of November.

Two more musical books, hot off the press, to tell you about on this August bank holiday - and get you in the mood, perhaps for musical work next term.

If you are a music theatre student - or a musical practitioner - maybe wanting to be the next Lloyd Webber, then you might find Julian Woolford’s excellent How Musicals Work: and How to Write Your Own a useful source of information.

Published by Nick Hern Books, the book outlines the creative process from hatching the initial idea and developing a structure for the work, through creating the book, music and lyrics and on to the crucial process of writing. Then [Woolford[(http://julianwoolford.net/), who has written and directed many musicals and lectures at the University of London on the subject, gives practical how-to advice relating to getting a musical produced, generating future productions and sustaining a career.

On Wednesday I saw my fourth Don Giovanni in as many months. Fortunately the music is so ravishing and the piece so full of potential that fatigue has not yet set in.

Co-Opera Co’s version was staged at The John McIntosh Centre, which is within the grounds of the London Oratory School near Earls Court. It is about to tour to Wolverhampton, Croydon, Yeovil, Bury St Edmunds and Wellingborough, among other venues.

It is a long time since I saw a Mozart opera in 18th century dress and this one, like ‘my’ other three Don Giovannis this summer, is set in the present: Yair Polishook as Leporello has fun with the famous list as a phone app. Everyone in the cast is strong: David Milner-Pearce gives us a fruity charismatic Don Giovanni (pictured above), Lisa Wilson sings beautifully as Donna Anna and Matthew Tomko brings suitable drama and bass depths to the Commendatore styled as a John Lennon lookalike - and there is some good work in the pit under Tim Murray.

Now in its fourth year, the Co-Opera Co is a co-operative opera company made up of members and associate members. The former are a group of like-minded, experienced professionals eager to pass on their expertise to the next generation, the associate members - professionals in the early stages of their careers. So, in a very real sense, this is a training organisation.