The National Film and Television School’s (NFTS) Graduate Impact Report landed Tuesday, and director Jon Wardle is taking THR through its wildly impressive numbers.

Every five years, the NFTS, located in Buckinghamshire, England — and included on The Hollywood Reporter‘s 2025 list of best international film schools —  collects an enormous amount of data demonstrating just how its alumni are continuing to better the U.K.’s busy film and TV industry.

From big-budget blockbusters Wicked and Barbie to acclaimed indie hits Kneecap, Love Lies Bleeding and Santosh, the new report highlights the depth of the school’s training, as well as the trust placed in NFTS talent by the world’s leading producers, studios and platforms. And with millions of pounds of funding on its way, the NFTS has big plans to bolster the breadth of their teaching.

Director Jon Wardle, who has worked at the NFTS since 2012 and been its director since 2017, caught up with THR for an exclusive first-look at the numbers, spanning the £28 billion ($38 billion) spent on film and high-end TV production in the U.K. up to 2024. Wardle’s five takeaways from this report, he hopes, demonstrate the school’s mighty footprint on Britain’s entertainment business as the NFTS remains “a key driver of industry talent and a powerful factor in attracting inward investment to the U.K.”

But the school’s chief also wants to make known his commitment to preparing the next generation of film and TV creatives for a rapidly-changing industry. “Am I inviting people into a precarious industry where they’re not going to be able to build a successful life?” Wardle asks, adding: “I want to make sure I’m helping them build a sustainable career.”

1. Contribution to the U.K.’s film and TV industry is sky-high

At first read, some of NFTS’ numbers are entirely unbelievable. In film, 75 percent of U.K. production spend since 2020 has involved at least one NFTS graduate, and this number rises to 89 percent when it comes to high-end TV. At the largest U.S. studios and producers — including the likes of Netflix, Disney, Amazon, Apple, Paramount, Sony Pictures, Universal and Warner Bros. — the school’s grads have a part to play in over 90 percent of their film spend in this country. “I was really encouraged by that,” Wardle says. “It’s better than it was in the previous five-year periods, despite all the challenges.”

On the set of Jon M. Chu’s blockbuster hit Wicked were 22 NFTS graduates; for Star Wars‘ critically-acclaimed spin-off series Andor with Diego Luna, it was 67. Elsewhere, 74 percent of revenues of the U.K.’s top 20 box office hits and 78 percent of revenues of the country’s top 20 independent films feature an NFTS graduate in a key role.

Pulling together these numbers is a task more important than ever in an industry in desperate need of some buoyancy, according to Wardle. “A studio exec said this to me: ‘You’re the first person who’s ever come into my office and shown me what your graduates do on my productions,’” he says. “There’s lots of money spent, lots of activity, but can we actually track through what those people actually go on to do? We recognize that if we’re going to ask the industry to support us as core funders, then you have to be able to demonstrate to them at the end of a year, or at the end of a five-year period, what you’ve done on their shows and films.” And it’s what students want, too. “They want to know they’re coming to a course that might lead them onto employment.”

2. Seniority among top professions continues to grow

Expected, sure, but for Wardle, still a cause for celebration. Graduates who were working as assistant art directors five years ago now lead the team. Those who started out as boom ops are sound recordists in their own right. “I hope, in five years’ time, we’ll see that grow again,” he says. In the film sector, for example, the influence of NFTS graduates has grown in tandem with the industry’s shift toward large-scale, inward-investment productions — an area where NFTS talent is particularly concentrated, according to the report. Their presence in key roles, including directors, producers and writers, on inward-investment film and TV projects has grown from 60 percent (2015-2019) to 67 percent of projects from 2020 to 2024.

The school hopes to build on the breadth of vocation they offer thanks to a recent £10 million ($13.5 million) investment from the U.K. government’s Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), and another £6 million ($8 million) fundraised by the industry. “We’re going to start some new disciplines,” explains Wardle. “We don’t teach costume [design] at the school. We’re going to start a costume department. We’re looking in the space around generative AI and also visual effects and virtual production. We’re developing two or three new courses in that space as we try and connect the dots between traditional art departments and visual effects and new modes of production, like virtual production. So we’re going to come out with three new courses by the end of the year in that space.”

As the school explores the possibilities of AI, Wardle admits they are making no effort to try and create “fully AI films.” It comes in the wake of uproar over AI “actress” Tilly Norwood, who, upon news that agencies are looking to sign the computer-generated talent, has made headlines attracting widespread condemnation from unions SAG-AFTRA, Equity, and some of Hollywood’s most notable onscreen names. Wardle says the NFTS will be helping those in different craft roles embrace the use of artificial intelligence when needed. “We’ve also had people come to us and say, ‘You’re selling out. You shouldn’t be doing this,’” he said. “But that feels like a very naive perspective, because [AI] is not going away. The genie is not going back in the bottle. So the key thing is, how do you help people navigate it effectively and ethically, also understand their own boundaries in it?”

3. One in three NFTS graduates come from diverse backgrounds

Through £2 million-a-year scholarships, an annual fundraising gala and with hubs across the country, the NFTS has bolstered its diversity initiative. This year, their stats pull out a 2021/2022 Ofcom report that states just 16 percent of employees working in Britain’s film and TV industry are from an ethnically diverse background, compared to 33 percent at the NFTS. “I’m really proud of that,” Wardle tells THR. “We are now delivering activity all over the country. We’ve got hubs in Glasgow, Cardiff, Leeds, and we’re definitely seeing that people who are engaging with us in those hubs, maybe on a short course or on a part time course, their confidence is built that they [feel they] can go on and do something more substantive.”

With the aforementioned funding from the DCMS, the NFTS campus will soon boast accommodation for disabled students. At the moment, Wardle explains, disabled students either have to live in London or Oxford and commute in. “We can’t talk about being inclusive and wanting the very best people to come — no matter of background — and then say to them, ‘But you have to live 45 minutes away and it’s going to be hugely expensive,’” he says.

The school is also proud to provide its diverse student body with the appropriate role models. “There are very successful Black, Asian graduates,” adds Wardle. “Whether you’re looking at someone like Trix Worrell who created [Channel 4 sitcom] Desmond’s, or Malorie Blackman, author of Noughts & Crosses… We often get application forms that say, ‘I know [Singaporean filmmaker] Anthony Chen went to your school and I want to walk in his footsteps.’”

4. Cross-sector skillsets are championed

Looking to the future, Wardle is particularly excited about giving his students the freedom to build on various skillsets — especially in an increasingly competitive market like games. “The writers’ strike showed us that if we rely on just film and high-end TV, it’s feast and famine,” he begins. “So a big thing we’ve been doing over the last few years is making sure all of our graduates in below-the-line roles — sound design, composing, production design — they all can also face into games as well.”

If a student is a sound designer for film, they should also be able to do games audio, says Wardle, and the same goes for composing. “We’re definitely seeing that,” he adds. “We’re not quantifying that, because, there’s not an equivalent of of IMDb for credits on games. But I’m seeing NFTS graduates do six months on a film, and then maybe go into a game project. That is definitely the future as we try and help people build sustainable careers.”

5. Individual stories spotlight industry-spanning impact

As director of the NFTS, Wardle admits he’s a real scholar — or, as his wife says, a complete nerd — when it comes to his graduates and their career trajectories. He can pick anyone’s name out of an end credits and know immediately they’re one of his, and highlights some of the more personal stories coming out of the 2020-2024 Graduate Impact Report. Francesca Gardiner, writer on His Dark Materials and a producer on Succession, is now showrunner on HBO’s hotly anticipated Harry Potter series. This year’s report features the first photo of Gardiner on the Harry Potter set. “She graduated the year I started at the school,” recalls Wardle. “She was my first school graduation in ceremony 2012 and now, to think that 12 years later she’s the showrunner of the biggest TV show in the world, which will run for 10 years… It’s kind of amazing.”

On Disney+’s adaptation of Jilly Cooper novel Rivals alone, four NFTS grads boast an impressive resume of work. Alexandra Brodski, director on episodes six and eight on the Happy Prince production, is currently directing all three opening episodes of Richard Gadd’s BBC/HBO series Half Man. Cinematographer Carlos Catalan has worked on Broadchurch, Dope Girls, Murdered by My Boyfriend and Killing Eve, and production designer Dominic Hyman on The Witcher, The Last Kingdom and earned an Emmy for outstanding art direction on HBO’s The Pacific. Rivals composer Natalie Holt made history as the first woman to score a live-action Star Wars project when she worked on Obi-Wan Kenobi for Disney+.

Wardle says: “You take people with a real passion and energy and you actually teach them. I think a lot of higher education has abandoned that. When I was at university before the film school, contact time in the university was maybe six to eight hours a week. At the NFTS it’s 30 hours a week. It’s like having a job. And we take small numbers. If you’re only taking 10 composers a year, 10 directors and so on, then you can really help them build their careers and segue out.” At the same amount of time, Wardle wants to make clear that success is never linear. “One of my concerns is that [the report] sends a message to a student that this going to be really easy, and it isn’t actually,” adds Wardle. “Behind all those individual stories are a huge amount of resilience, perseverance and hustle.”