# The National Film and Television School Pension Scheme

The National Film and Television School Pension Scheme is a Pension Fund based in Beaconsfield, United Kingdom.

## Overview

- **Organization type:** Pension Fund
- **Headquarters:** Beaconsfield, United Kingdom
- **Region:** Europe
- **Address:** Beaconsfield, United Kingdom
- **Founded:** 1971
- **Assets under management:** Undisclosed
- **Website:** nfts.co.uk
- **LinkedIn:** https://www.linkedin.com/company/national-film-

## Regulatory record

- **Reports private funds:** No

## About

The scheme is the legacy pension vehicle for The National Film and Television School (NFTS) in Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire — an institution whose alumni have shaped British and global cinema since 1971. Like many UK defined-benefit plans established before the 2000s shift to defined-contribution models, the scheme was closed to new members and future accrual, converting it into a run-off entity. Its sole purpose is meeting accrued benefits for a closed pool of former NFTS academic and administrative staff. The sponsoring employer, NFTS, remains ultimately responsible for any funding shortfall under UK pensions law. The investment strategy is consistent with a maturing, cash-flow-negative pension scheme: capital preservation and liability-driven investing dominate. The asset mix is concentrated in UK government bonds, investment-grade corporate credit, and indexed liability-matching instruments, with negligible exposure to venture capital, private equity, or real assets. There is no evidence of direct film-production investment, co-financing structures, or entertainment-sector allocations that might be mistaken for mission-related investing. The geographic footprint is exclusively UK-focused, reflecting both the liability profile and the regulatory framework overseen by The Pensions Regulator. The trustees delegate day-to-day investment management to an external professional fiduciary or fiduciary manager — common practice for small UK schemes that lack internal investment staff. The scheme files annual accounts with Companies House and submits triennial valuation reports to The Pensions Regulator. As of the most recent publicly available valuation, the scheme's funding level and precise asset total remain unpublished, consistent with small exempt schemes that face limited public disclosure obligations. Structurally, the scheme differs from vast UK local-government pension pools or university-wide multi-employer arrangements: it is a tiny, single-employer trust with no capacity for new participants and no strategic pivot toward growth assets. Its distinct architecture is its simplicity — a frozen liability book managed to extinction, with the sponsoring employer's financial covenant as the true backstop. The scheme represents the tail end of a single institution's pension promise, not a platform for institutional co-investment or innovation.

## Questions

### How is the scheme funded and what is its covenant strength?

The sponsoring employer — the National Film and Television School — backs the scheme through deficit-reduction contributions when a funding shortfall exists. The school’s covenant relies on a mix of government grant funding, commercial production revenue, and student fees. This narrow, single-employer covenant means trustees pay unusually close attention to the school’s annual operating results compared to larger multi-employer arts-sector pension arrangements.

### How is this scheme different from the Universities Superannuation Scheme?

The NFTS Pension Scheme is a single-employer trust, whereas USS is a multi-employer hybrid plan covering over 300 institutions. NFTS trustees face a concentrated covenant and cannot share funding risk across a wider sector pool. This makes the scheme smaller, more idiosyncratic in its liability profile, and structurally closer to a traditional corporate DB plan than to the pooled academic schemes.

## Related profiles

- [The King's Fund](https://altss.com/profile/the-kings-fund)
- [The Queen's College, Oxford University](https://altss.com/profile/the-queens-college-oxford-university)

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Last updated: 2026-08-11T02:43:31.692Z

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