The Shakespeare Curriculum is a completely new way of studying Shakespeare using the latest new learning technology and innovation. With a major investment from The Foyle Foundation, it is the most important development in the teaching of Shakespeare in our lifetime and will become the home for all Shakespeare learning for schools and teachers in the UK and around the world. The aim is that it will be used by 80% of all UK secondary schools by the academic year 2029/30. The Shakespeare Curriculum responds to concerns from teachers and young people about the way in which Shakespeare is experienced by students in the UK and aims to put young people in the creative role by involving them in bringing a play to life for performance. It uses the construct of a rehearsal process as the frame for teaching and learning and creates opportunities for young people to experience first-hand some of the creative decisions made by people working in theatre.

Mini Wonders – an Early Years Innovation in Museums programme, a partnership between Art Fund, Nesta and The Foyle Foundation on a major UK wide pilot supporting museums to engage children under five and their parents/caregivers, generating new research and learning that can be implemented at scale by museums across the UK in the long term.

Following on from the pilot of the Teacher Art Pass, the Foundation is also funding the expansion and development of the scheme, specifically a new Digital Platform which will be available to all teachers across the UK to access free of charge. It will bring together key information and resources from across Art Fund’s network of 900+ museum partners into one easily accessible platform. It will provide a wealth of creative resources, information and guidance to enable teachers to access their local museums and embed museum learning within their teaching.

The Royal Welsh College of Music & Drama is the national conservatoire of Wales. Established in 1949 to train future generations of professionals across the performing arts and related industries, it offers foundation, undergraduate and postgraduate degrees to over 900 students from 40 countries, taught by world-class tutors and visiting artists. The College is in the process of renovating the Old Library in Cardiff’s city centre to create a new accessible base for the performing arts, complete with space for public performance, exhibition and wide community use. Long-term the transformation of the Old Library will manifest the College’s commitment to embed the performing arts at the heart of contemporary society. It will also support the regeneration of the local area, expand the facilities for the College’s students and facilitate greater arts engagement for the people of South Wales and beyond.

Ulster Orchestra Society is Northern Ireland’s only professional Symphony Orchestra. The Foyle Foundation’s grant of £1M will go towards the extensive redevelopment of Townsend Street Church on the peace line in Belfast to create the first permanent home for the Orchestra. The restored church will provide a rehearsal and events space, a music learning and community engagement hub, and a dedicated recording studio, enabling the Orchestra to expand its work and impact in the Belfast community and across the region.

To mark the National Gallery’s Bicentenary on 10 May 2024, it launched a year-long festival of art and a suite of building projects, known as NG200, in order to celebrate its history as the nation’s gallery and to serve the public for the 21st century. The Foyle Foundation’s grant supports the NG200 Welcome capital project and NG200 Programme nationwide. The Foyle Room has been named in celebration of this legacy grant and the long standing support of The Foyle Foundation.

The National Theatre’s £125M fundraising campaign Stories Start Here, the most ambitious in its history, will raise funds for world-class theatre, nationwide education projects and urgent capital upgrades to ensure the future of the organisation, which has a global audience reach of 19 million. The campaign will ensure that millions of people continue to enjoy innovative, ambitious theatre made on the South Bank and will support the next generation of creatives to train at the National Theatre Skills Centre. The Foyle Foundation’s grant has kick started the redevelopment of unique backstage areas, some of which have not been updated in nearly 50 years since the theatre first opened in 1976. In recognition of this legacy grant and previous major support from the Foundation, the National Theatre has named its members’ room the Foyle Room.

The ageing Britten Pears building at Snape Maltings will undergo significant renovation to improve facilities and environmental impact.  The building is Britten Pears Arts centre for training young musicians and singers at the start of their careers.  The legacy grant is a lead gift to kick start their capital campaign for improvements.  The Foyle Foyer celebrates this legacy grant and previous major Foyle support for Britten Pears Arts – the pioneering music, arts and heritage charity based on the Suffolk coast at two popular, historic visitor destinations: The Red House and Snape Maltings.

The Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award, founded by the Poetry Society in 1998, has been heavily invested in and supported by The Foyle Foundation since 2001. Consequently, the Award has become internationally renowned as the leading poetry competition for young people aged 11 to 17 years, attracting over 17,000 entries last year. Its impact on the future lives of young poets has been transformational, with past award winners now at the forefront of British poetry, having gone onto win major adult prizes, appear in anthologies, publish solo collections, as well as developing careers in publishing, editing and teaching creative writing. The endowment grant of £500K will underpin the delivery of the Award for the next ten years from 2026 – 2036.

The British Library’s transformation of its West Yorkshire site in Boston Spa will create state of the art storage facilities that will safeguard the collection for the next half a century and improve its impact on the environment, as well as building new capacity for the collection. The Foyle Foundation’s legacy grant of £1M has added in the ability for visitors, schools and community groups to see behind the scenes and discover how 21st-century robotic technology powers each new journey of discovery at the Library. The Foyle Grant also enables a dedicated learning space to be created to deliver their world beating education programme for schools.

The Foyle Foundation is providing an expandable endowment as the lead donor for the Sadler’s Wells Creative Development Fund to support and provide long-term seed funding for new choreography, new commissions and adventurous creative projects by the global dance organisation, Sadler’s Wells. The ‘Foyle Studio’ at the new Sadler’s Wells East has been named in recognition of this grant and the Foundation’s long standing support for the internationally important dance organisation.

The Edinburgh Festival Fringe is the world’s largest arts festival, which takes place every August presenting over 3,750 shows, alongside 400 street performers and attended by around 780,000 people. The Edinburgh Festival Fringe Society is the charity that underpins the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. The Foyle Foundation’s £1M grant will go towards the development of the Fringe Society’s new home, securing long-term sustainability of the Fringe Society and bringing together for the first time its operations in one centre, as well as providing the opportunity for a new publicly accessible space for artists and the community year-round. The new home will be located in the Southbridge Community Resource Centre, former Schoolhouse on Infirmary Street in Edinburgh’s Old Town.

A world first in size and scale, V&A East Storehouse presents over half a million works from every creative discipline.  Opening on 31 May 2025, in a new purpose-built public space and working store designed by world-renowned architects Diller Scofidio+Renfro, taking over a section of the former London 2012 Olympics Media Centre in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, the warehouse-type space is designed to give unprecedented access to the V&A’s collections for the first time. Public access and creative skills development will be at the heart of the new building. The Foyle Creative Centre, encompassing two creative studios and two workshop spaces, will engage the public and students in real-world design, learning and making experiences.

The £2M legacy grant is the lead gift in a major endowment campaign for The Glasshouse International Centre for Music, Gateshead in its 20th anniversary year, to improve and expand opportunities in music for everyone across the North East. This year, the charity will bring together all its music education and artist development activity within the Foyle Music Centre with the aim of reaching out to more young people across their four new music learning hot-spots (Carlisle, Sunderland, Darlington and Middlesbrough) increasing the number of places available, reducing financial barriers to learning, and supporting emerging professional musicians. The Foyle Music Centre will increase access to music education across genres and practices, from electronic to classical, for future generations.

The Foyle Foundation has added to its £12.3 million investment in the development of libraries in primary schools across the nation with a further £1.8 million to support the National Literacy Trust and Penguin Random House’s Libraries for Primaries programme to provide a library in every primary school by the end of the decade. Current estimates show that 1 in 7 state primary schools in the UK still lack a dedicated library or reading space which increases to 1 in 4 in more disadvantaged areas. Over the last 25 years, the Foyle Foundation’s specific investment in the Foyle School Library Programme aimed at tackling the crisis in children’s literacy, has supported more than 2,000 state schools across the country potentially reaching more than half a million children.