Higher education faces the challenge of making it clear to overseas students that the UK is still a vibrant, tolerant and open country in spite of the vote to leave the EU, the principal of one of Europe’s leading conservatoires has said.

Before the vote, the Guildhall School of Music and Drama released striking photographs of its young symphony orchestra with and without EU students. In total, 49 of its 109 orchestra members come from other European Union countries.

The school’s principal, Barry Ife, said: “We were trying to bring to people’s attention just how important and essential a part of our cultural fabric EU students are. I was sitting in a concert doing a mental stock-take of how many EU students we had in our orchestra and what it would look like if those students were not there.”

What the Guildhall symphony orchestra would look like without students from other EU countries. Photograph: Paul J Cochrane/Guildhall School of Music and Drama

All the students will remain, but Ife said last week’s vote had felt like a “death in the family”. The mood among staff and students was very low. “We had a lot of tears around the place. There was shock … when it actually happens and you realise that the majority of your compatriots don’t want to engage with continental Europe in the way we have been doing for the last 40 or 50 years, it is a big shock.”

The Guildhall school has more than 200 students from EU countries and the job now, he said, was making it clear that they were still welcome. “The thing that depresses me and many of my colleagues is the message that has gone out from this country. It is a public relations disaster. Leaving aside any economic impacts and so on, it is the kind of country that we are projecting ourselves as.

“Institutions and individuals have now got to work really hard in making it clear that we are still a vibrant, tolerant, open and enthusiastically international country in spite of the impression that might have been given last week.”

Ife said his school would have a comprehensive marketing and PR strategy aimed at international audiences in place by the end of the week. “Nothing has changed in my institution … Our determination to engage with talented people around the world is if anything more intense than it was last week.”

Most if not all of Britain’s orchestras are strikingly international and their umbrella group, the Association of British Orchestras, has also warned of challenges ahead.



Its director, Mark Pemberton, said: “We will need the new leadership of this country to give us guarantees as to continued freedom of movement across Europe’s borders for our orchestras, artists and orchestral musicians, and whether the many pan-European regulations that currently affect our sector, from VAT cultural exemption to harmonisation of radio spectrum, noise at work to the digital single market, will still apply.

“The worst outcome for our members will be additional uncertainty, bureaucracy and expense, allied to a worsening of their financial viability.”

The minister of state for universities and science, Jo Johnson, tried to reassure EU students in the UK via Twitter. He wrote: