Pippa Harris and Alison Lomax Join Britain's National Film and Television School Board
Two of Britain's best-known names in screen work have joined the board of the National Film and Television School, the country's national training school for film and TV makers. Deadline reported the appointments on 29 October 2026.
Pippa Harris is a producer and the founder of Neal Street, the production company. She is a double Oscar nominee. Her credits include the war film 1917, the BBC drama Call the Midwife and Hamnet. Her upcoming projects include Sam Mendes' planned quartet of films about The Beatles.
Alison Lomax is managing director of YouTube UK and Ireland, a role she has held for nearly four years. Her job covers working with government and policymakers, and partnering with broadcasters and producers. That gives the school a voice from the online video platform that many young people now watch first.
The NFTS is based at Beaconsfield, west of London. Its board is joined by people from across the industry. BBC content boss Kate Phillips and Sky Studios chief executive Cécile Frot-Coutaz also sit on the governors' board. Other board members named by Deadline include Ash Atalla, founder of Roughcut TV, Farhana Bhula, director of Film4, Julian Bellamy, managing director of ITV Studios, and Polly Cochrane, a former vice president at Warner Bros. Discovery. Sophie Turner Laing chairs the school.
The timing sits alongside a building project. The NFTS is preparing to open The Cubby Broccoli Building at Beaconsfield in January 2027. The new block adds 25,000 square feet of teaching space, which is about 2,300 square metres.
For a general reader, the simplest way to see the news is this. The school trains the people who write, shoot, edit and produce the programmes you watch. Its board sets the direction for those courses, and the people on it now come from the BBC, Sky, ITV, Film4, YouTube and independent production. The school's new building will give students more room to train in the same subjects.
