The Royal Academy of Music gates every overseas centre behind a video pre-screening round whose deadline is the same day as the application itself, auditions in Qingdao and Hong Kong only — no Beijing or Shanghai — and charges £134.50 to apply, the most of the four. Its Bicentenary Scholarship covers full tuition plus a maintenance grant, is awarded automatically at audition and carries no Home fee status restriction. International tuition for 2027/28 is £30,850, not the widely quoted £29,900. Every figure sourced and dated.

The Royal College of Music auditions in Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong, assesses scholarships automatically at audition, and asks only IELTS 5.5 at undergraduate level. But the ABRSM award — the one full scholarship open to an international undergraduate, worth full tuition plus £5,000 a year — requires auditioning in London, so an overseas centre forfeits it. Composition, conducting, organ, percussion and historical instruments are excluded from every overseas centre. International tuition for 2027/28 is £32,600, rising 2–7% a year. Every figure sourced and dated.

Wells Cathedral School is the odd one out among the four English specialist music schools: a full mainstream school of 688 pupils aged 2 to 18, with a specialist music course inside it that its 2026 inspection put at around a third of the roll. The headline boarding fee looks the cheapest of the four — £52,224 a year for Years 9 to 11, VAT included — but specialist musicians pay a further £20,586 a year on top, taking the real figure to £72,810, and an overseas family pays another £1,599 above that. The fee ladder, the three tiers of music tuition, the MDS scale and the residence rule Wells words more broadly than its peers.

Chetham's School of Music in central Manchester is the largest of the four English specialist music schools, with 331 pupils on roll and eight departments — organ, harpsichord, harp, guitar, saxophone, a jazz department and a historical performance pathway among them. Fees for 2026–27 are £42,024 day and £54,947 boarding, VAT included, but the school says over 90% of pupils receive some financial support and around a quarter are fully funded through the Music and Dance Scheme. Entry ages, the audition, the two application fees and the funding arithmetic, every figure sourced and dated.

The Purcell School at Bushey is the only one of the four English specialist music schools that publishes indicative grade standards by age. Entry is 11 to 18, with no admission into Year 11 or Year 13. Fees for 2026–27 are £42,498 day and £54,262 boarding, VAT included; on the Music and Dance Scheme scale a household with £100,000 of relevant income pays £18,587 for boarding.

The Yehudi Menuhin School takes just under 100 pupils aged 8 to 19 and admits on instrumental audition alone. Two audition rounds, 2026–27 fees of £49,260 day and £50,564 boarding before VAT, and the Music and Dance Scheme residence rule that decides what an overseas family actually pays.