As I report in this week’s The Stage, 82% of last year’s 16 year old leavers from Sylvia Young Theatre School (SYTS) got 5 or more A* to C grades at GSCE including the crucial maths and English.

That puts the school academically streets ahead of most mainstream schools whose 2008 average was 47.2% (including English and maths). Yet SYTS students do all their academic work in just three days per week so that those precious two days are available at the end of each week for their specialist acting, singing and dancing work. Given that the school is academically non-selective (of course) and that some of the children have special needs it’s a remarkable achievement by any standards.

But, actually, it isn’t unique either. If you look at the other full time stage schools and the music and dance schools funded by means tested government grant to pupils you find a clear pattern. They nearly all turn out high level academic results as well as high calibre performers.

At Chethams School for Music in Manchester, for example, 100% of last year’s Year 11 got 5 or more A*-Cs (including English and maths) and the school achieves this almost every year. At Arts Educational School in London 100% of the girls and 79% of the boys did likewise.

Why is this? Surely it can’t be because performing arts-inclined youngsters are ‘brighter’? Hardly, given that the intake is usually academically very mixed. The only selection is for performing arts, music or dancing potential.

Here’s something to look out for in 2009. A new ‘drama training network’ is to be established for Scotland. The idea is to beef up all aspects of drama training across the country.

Not before time. It struck me forcibly when I spent two wet August days in 2008 taking part in an Edinburgh Fringe training event, organised by National Council of Drama Training (NCDT) in partnership with The Stage and others, that professional drama training in Scotland is now spread so thin that there are big holes in it.

Do we need ‘a new approach to culture and learning in England’? Yes, according to the Culture and Learning Consortium. It represents this rather breathless list of organisations: Arts Council England, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Clore Duffield Foundation, Esme Fairbarn Foundation, Foyle Foundation, Heritage Lottery Fund, Museums, Libraries & Archives Council, Northern Rock Foundation and Paul Hamlyn Foundation.

The consortium’s report Culture and Learning: A new agenda for advocacy and action, published earlier this month calls on central government, local authorities, regional agencies, schools and cultural organisations ‘to work together to shape a new agenda for cultural learning to meet the needs, aspirations and talents of all learners.’

Think it sounds a bit waffly and vague? What do they actually want changed?

Well it seems to boil down to trying to persuade all ‘cultural organisations’ (that means theatre companies. venues and the like) to do more education. Can’t argue with that although I can’t think of a single one which doesn’t already do a great deal of education work with schools, colleges, drama schools and so on.

We should also train teachers more thoroughly in ‘cultural learning’ according to this report. Do we really want to treat ‘cultural learning’ as if it were a stand-alone curriculum area? Surely it should be integral to everything teachers and other educators do not a quick-fix bolt-on?

And I’m against the idea of setting up yet another costly organisation or quango to ‘underpin’ (do they mean sort out? ) ‘culture’ and education. The report argues for a Cultural Learning Alliance to ‘develop and advocate for a coherent national strategy for cultural learning’ The Civil Service-speak is not encouraging and seems a long way from getting more young people to read more books and see or take part in more performances.

Never underestimate the training potential of pantomime. We all know it’s a good source of mid-winter work but, especially for beginners its also a valuable route to some very practical training by, with and from seasoned pros.

At this time of year when I see a pantomime or other form of children’s Christmas show almost every day - and sometimes more than one - I’m struck forcibly by the number of young people I spot being trained on the job.

Here’s a bit of good news. Founded in the 1980s, Portland Green is an agency which commissions, produces, exhibits and distributes artists’ moving image works. Now it is launching mentoring opportunities to help artists deal with the choices and obstacles which crop up at every point in the creative process.

The history is interesting too. Producer/director Portland Green started the organisation which bears her name. She trained in dance herself but wanted to broaden audience experience of dance. She was also keen to encourage dance practitioners to use other art forms and new technologies.

In the New Year National Association of Youth Theatres (NAYT) plans to introduce an Excellence and Inclusion Scheme for all youth theatres - one of those benchmark jobs whose logo attached to an organisation indicates quality - like the Corgi standards for gas fitters, if you like.

It’s that time of year again: the season when editors ask the bookworms on their staff or freelance list for book-of-the-year recommendations.

Doing this as education editor of The Stage means, obviously, that I have to choose a performing arts training or education book. It sends me scurrying back to my log of everything I’ve reviewed or read this year. And that sets me thinking about what actually counts as a ‘training book’.

All performing arts related books - biographies, memoirs, histories, new editions of texts or approaches to text - are educational in the sense that all have something to teach you.

Reading Michael Billington’s wonderful State of the Nation (available in paperback in the New Year - Ed.) which won the 2008 STR award was a real educational journey for me, detailing at it does the history of theatre since 1945. So, in a different way was R Burton Palmer’s contribution to Methuen Drama’s Screen Adaptations series on Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird”. And I learned a lot about working in theatre and film from Julie Walters’s entertaining autobiography That’s Another Story too. Yet none of these would ever be described as a ‘training book’ in the narrow sense.

But, good as they are, I think it would be a shame if we restricted our view of education to books such as Arthur Barstow’s Handbook of Acting Techniques, Jean Marlow’s Audition Speeches for 6-16 year olds or Jona Howl’s 100 Exercises to get you into drama school. Education — which must surely include learning, growth and development — is bigger than that. Someone once said that dogs are trained but people are educated.

So what would you choose as the best (ie furthest reaching, most orginal, entertaining, thought provoking, informative etc) performing arts education book of 2008 ?

See the pre-Christmas bumper edition of The Stage if you want to know what, after much deliberation, I chose in the end.

I’m still mulling over the production of A Christmas Carol, directed by Jolyon McCarthy, its recently appointed Director of Drama, which I’ve just seen in Benenden School’s new state-of-the-art theatre. This independent school in rural Kent has given us a good show, neatly directed and competently acted although a fuller house might have made for more atmosphere.

There is no doubt that theatres in schools - often run by professional practitioners so that the students are not just ‘learning drama’ they are being trained in practical skills by working on the edge of the industry - are beginning to play quite a big role in initial training as more and more schools build them.

20 years ago, at a dinner I found myself sitting with, and chatting to, Nicholas Rowe, actor son of Andrew Rowe MP who was hosting the event - and who has been in the news recently because he died in November. The younger Rowe, then 20-ish told me he was an actor and that he’d cut his thespian teeth in the theatre at school.

Never underestimate the thorough, practical theatre arts training received by adult amateurs in operatic societies who can’t quite afford to give up the day-job. I’ve just seen Cambridge Operatic Society’s lovely Ruddigore at the Cambridge Corn Exchange.

Aged 17-25 and interested in some sort of backstage performing arts career from prop-making, to directing or from sound management to marketing?

The Dream: An Actor’s Story is one of the most insightful and informative theatrical memoirs I’ve ever read. If you are a student or a theatre goer with an intelligent interest in what it’s really like to be an actor, how the rehearsal process works and what first nights are like then Leigh Lawson’s book should be at the top of your reading list.

Today (19 November) is World Toilet Day. So it’s a jolly good time to air the age-old problem of lavatory facilities at performance venues or lack of them - especially for women. And yes, this is a training issue because it’s quite clear to me - and any other woman who has ever queued a quarter of an hour or more for an interval pee in theatre or concert hall - that most designers of loos are men in woeful need of training.

The Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) has identified Tinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance as one of eight ‘models of excellence’ - that means it has good and innovative community, education and ‘knowledge transfer systems’ (aka as good teaching). It is something of a feather in Trinity Laban’s cap that it is the only specialist arts organisation amongst the eight.

So what does Trinity Laban do to have attracted this accolade?

Who says engineering and the arts are incompatible?