Bachelor of Arts - Drama and English Literature (Honours)

This joint degree combines practical theatre making with literary study: performance, devising and theatre history alongside poetry, fiction and drama as literature, with dramatic text serving as the natural meeting point.

Studying plays both as literature and as blueprints for performance produces a distinctive double literacy — textual analysis and staging imagination — that serves dramaturgy, teaching and theatre education particularly well.

The combination also builds the sustained academic writing that literature demands alongside the collaborative practice that theatre requires, and Five admission windows appear in the source, split between September starts and January starts.

The teaching route deserves specific attention here because it is unusually well served by this combination: English is a core secondary subject with continuous recruitment, drama is frequently taught alongside it, and PGCE providers value candidates who can offer both credibly. Students planning that path should accumulate classroom experience during the degree, since school observation hours strengthen PGCE applications materially and confirm the vocation before the postgraduate year is paid for. Beyond teaching, the pairing supports dramaturgy, literary management and arts education, and the analytical writing it develops transfers into communications work at competitive graduate salaries. Applicants intending to teach outside the UK should check their destination country’s recognition requirements early, since qualification rules differ substantially between systems.

Teaching, arts administration and applied theatre provide the main destinations at £19,000–£24,000, with PGCE conversion opening qualified teaching. The honours degree qualifies for the Graduate Route at the 18-month post-2026 term, and dependants are excluded on taught routes.