 His contemporaries at the Slade included a number of brilliant young students, among them Dora Carrington, Mark Gertler, Paul Nash, Christopher Nevinson, Stanley Spencer, David Bomberg and Bernard Meninsky.The Slade's emphasis on the importance of drawing and sound structuring of composition would inform Roberts's later work.In 1912 he won the Slade's Melville Nettleship prize for Figure Composition.