The Central School of Speech and Drama, a constituent college of the University of London since 2005, was founded in 1906 by Elsie Fogerty to offer a new form of training in speech and drama for young actors and other students. Before the war, it was based at the Royal Albert Hall although it moved during the war to Exeter. In 1963, a breakaway group of teachers and students founded Drama Centre London in nearby Chalk Farm. Nowadays, Central's campus is centred around the Embassy Theatre in Swiss Cottage in North London, and, as a government-funded Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning benefits from state-of-the-art facilities.

Central is not only an acting school, offering training and education in the broadest range of vocational and applied theatre specialisms available anywhere in the world. Courses are provided in acting, costume design, design for the stage, directing, applied theatre & education, drama and movement therapy, dramaturgy, lighting design and production, media and drama education, musical theatre, performance arts, prop-making, puppetry, scenic art, scenic construction, costume construction, scenography, set design, theatre sound, stage management, technical and production management and writing.

Central, with over 850 registered students and a faculty of 50 specialist academic staff claims to be "the UK’s largest and most wide-ranging specialist drama institution" , says that the School's staff is the "largest grouping of drama/theatre/performance specialists in the UK", and that the postgraduate body is "one of the largest gatherings of specialist Postgraduates in Europe". While retaining the conservatoire ethos of its world-famous actor training programme and its industry-focused specialist technical theatre training, it has also recently developed its research profile, and recruited its own doctoral students. In 2005, the School became a largely independent college of the federal University of London and was designated the Centre for Excellence in Training for Theatre by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE).

Honorary Fellows include Declan Donnellan, Richard Schechner, Jude Kelly, Ronald Harwood and Catherine Tate.