Frequently Asked Questions

Registration is a one-time thing you have to do to obtain a login on this website. A login is usually your email address^[1]. A login goes along with a password, and you need to use these to log into the website to manage your Festival entries.

Registration normally opens in mid-October every year and lasts until around the first or second week of December that year. When registration opens, the home page of this website will indicate any deadline date when registration closes. After registration closes, you will no longer be able to register, and therefore no longer be able to add entries for the Festival. You may, however, be able to add entries for your children/pupils through a friend or teacher who has already registered before the deadline.

The deadline for adding and paying for your Festival entries is around mid-December, a week after the registration deadline. The exact deadline will be shown on the home page when registration opens.

Remember, if you've already registered, for example in a previous year, you don't need to register again.

To register, you fill in a short form giving your name (not your child's name),  your email address, telephone number and postal address. Once you've submitted it, you'll get an email telling you how to log in. Once you've logged in, you can change your password for future logins and manage your entries for the current Festival year. Any entrants you added in previous years will be remembered.

This initial email may not come particularly quickly. Please don't re-register with a different email address just because you haven't received an email after a few minutes. Also, make sure to check your Junk Mail or other spam mail folder to ascertain whether our email has ended up there.

The reason why the initial email can take a while is that we have to do manual checks of new registrations. This is because people sometimes register multiple times with different emails, even though we ask them not to. This creates an additional support burden for us which we are not equipped to deal with.

Password reset emails, on the other hand, don't take very long - five or ten minutes at most, unless something is amiss. They are completely automated. If you have registered before but forgotten your password, going to the login page, adding your email address and clicking Forgot password will result in a password reset email being sent to you. Remember to check your Junk Mail folder for these, too.

An entrant is a performer in the Festival. It could be an individual child or an ensemble or group. When you log in to manage your entries, you should see tabs for "Manage Entrants" and "Manage Entries". If you have not entered (a particular entrant) for the Festival before you need to add them via "Manage Entrants" before you can add entries for them in "Manage Entries".

To add an entrant, you need to specify the first name and last name (for an individual) or school name and group name (for a group) for the entrant. You'll need to specify if the entrant is a group/ensemble or not. If it's an individual, you'll be asked for a date of birth (for music sections) or an academic year (Speech & Drama). You can select the relevant section to work with when you log in. If you give the date of birth, that will be used to work out the School Year for Speech & Drama, so you shouldn't need to enter both if you've specified a birthdate.

You don't need to add individual entries for people who are only performing in ensembles and groups. Just add the group itself as an entrant. You only need to add individuals as entrants if they are going to be performing in solo classes or Speech & Drama Duologue classes. For course, if someone is performing both in solo/duologue classes, they should be entered as individuals for the solo class. If you are adding an individual, even if they are performing as part of a group, make sure the "This entrant is a group" checkbox remains unchecked. You need to provide the birthdate or school year for all entrants who are performing in solo/Duologue classes.

Adding a piece to an entry requires that (a) the piece is known to the system and (b) that the piece is associated with an entry. Many commonly performed pieces are in the system already, so you often don't need to do anything special to ensure (a).

1. In the "Manage Entries" tab, select the entry for which you want to add or change a piece from the list on the left of the page. (The list will appear above the text "Number of programmes you'd like to pre-order". If you don't see the list, maximise your browser window and minimise the browser font size until you do see it. To make the browser font smaller, press Ctrl and minus together a number of times - each time, the font should get smaller.) The highlighted entry will display a blue background with white text, and the entry's details will appear in the fields on the right.
2. Click the box under the text "The piece to be performed". You should see a list of pieces appear, unless you are adding pieces in a Music section - in that case, you can just type the name of the piece, optionally followed by the name of the composer in round brackets, and then pressing the Enter key.
3. Start typing in the title of the piece, using the most unusual word in it to find a match more quickly. Entries matching what you type will appear in the list.
4. If the Speech & Drama piece you want doesn't appear in the list, switch to the "Manage Pieces" tab and add the piece by entering the name of the piece and the author, and then clicking "Add piece". As you type into either name or author fields, a list of matching pieces already in our system will appear, so that you don't enter it again with a slightly different spelling. Once you have added your piece(s), go back to "Manage Entries" and step no. 1 in this list. The piece you just added should now appear in the list.
5. Once you have selected the desired piece from the list, click "Update entry" and you should see the piece appear against the entry in the list on the left.
6. Do this for each Own Choice entry where no piece is specified.

Note that you (a) don't actually upload anything to the website, merely add the names of thre pieces and their authors (if not already on the system) and then associate them with individual entries, and (b) You still need to print clean legible copies of own choice pieces to bring with you on the days of the performance, to be handed to the adjudicator before the performance begins.

Once all the entries are in, the process of timetabling begins, with each Section of the Festival (Speech & Drama, Pianoforte, Vocal etc.) doing their own timetables. Once that's done, which is usually in the early part of January, the dates and times of specific classes will be known, and someone from each Section where you've made entries should contact you with the timetable. If you need to ask anything specific, please contact the relevant Section Secretary. If a Section Secretary provides a downloadable timetable to the webmaster, that timetable will be added to the website and a link provided to it.

A Speech & Drama timetable for entries you've made is available if you log in and navigate to the "Printable Views" tab, There, you'll see a link "Speech & Drama timetable (PDF)" which will allow you to view/download the timetable.