Drama and music tend to be described as enrichment, which is a slightly odd word. It suggests something added on top of the real education, nice to have if there is time. Anyone who has watched a shy child come off stage after a first performance would put it rather differently.
The skills are not soft
Consider what a school production actually asks of a child. Learn a large quantity of material by heart. Deliver it clearly enough to be understood by someone forty feet away. Time your contribution to fit precisely with what several other people are doing. Recover, in real time and without visible panic, when one of them gets it wrong.
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That is memory, projection, listening, collaboration and improvisation under pressure. We call these soft skills, but there is nothing soft about performing them at seven o’clock in front of two hundred parents.
Music does something similar with a different emphasis. Ensemble playing in particular is an unusually pure exercise in listening while contributing, which is a skill most adults are still working on.
Something to be good at that is not marked
Most of what children do at school is assessed and compared. Performing arts offer something different: a form of achievement that is public, real and not reducible to a grade. The audience clapped or they did not. The show worked or it did not.
For children who are academically middling, this can be transformative, because it is the first evidence they have that they are exceptional at something. For academically strong children it can be almost as valuable, because it introduces them to a domain where being clever is not sufficient and effort has to go somewhere new.
Confidence, properly understood
Schools talk a lot about confidence and often mean something fairly superficial. What performing actually builds is more specific and more useful: the knowledge that you can be nervous and do it anyway.
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That is not the same as not being nervous. Experienced performers are frequently terrified. What they have is evidence, accumulated over many performances, that fear is survivable and does not prevent competence. A child who has that at twelve carries it into interviews, presentations and difficult conversations for the rest of their life.
It is also where friendships happen
Rehearsals do something that few other school activities manage. They mix year groups, they run for weeks, and they require everyone to depend on each other for a shared outcome. Children who would never otherwise have spoken end up with something in common. For a child who has not found their place socially, a production can be the thing that solves it.
This is part of why schools that take the performing arts seriously tend to feel different when you walk round them. At Manor House School in Bookham, drama, music and LAMDA work run right through from the youngest year groups upwards rather than appearing as an option later, which is what makes it normal to take part rather than brave.
The point, if your child is not a performer
Not every child wants to be on stage, and none of this argues that they should be pushed there. But performing arts departments need lighting, sound, costume, set building, stage management and front of house, and every one of those roles involves the same essential experience: contributing to something bigger than you, on a deadline, with other people depending on you.
That is worth a place in the timetable, not just the end of term.