A College for Life

When I opened The MTA back in 2009 I knew from the outset that I wanted to run a college that would be there for its graduates even at the end of the course.

When I left college (back in the year when dinosaurs roamed the earth), I felt that I'd literally been thrown off a cliff. For sure they'd given me a backpack full of 'tools', and for all I knew they might have packed a parachute too, but they never had the foresight to let me know so I was just left in freefall for a little while.

Now in fairness times were different then, and my course rather bizarrely used to proudly say that they weren't training professionals and they weren't training teachers. . . but then never did tell us what they were training us for? However I got to create music and theatre all day, every day for 3 years, so I didn't care.

However, on leaving I do remember that feeling of being lost out in an industry that seemingly everybody else had a road map for (or would that be sat nav nowadays?) 

Obviously, training is massively different now, and I intended to open a college with a clear end game - to get performers out into the industry. The business side of our profession was going to be 'taught' alongside the jazz hands. I was adamant that 'my' students would know what was in their tool kit and how to use all the different tools. However, I also wanted to be very clear that I had packed a parachute. Hence the college for life policy.

Being a small college I wanted my graduates to know that the door was always open to them. Not just in a 'pop in and have a chat' way but in a very real, practical way. Rehearsal space is expensive, so I could give them that, dance classes are expensive, so they could come back and join in with ours, even prepping a song for an audition is expensive, so we could help them with that. Most importantly of all though, I wanted them to have the same level of pastoral care and mental health support available to them after graduating as they had received at college.

The MTA takes a whole school approach to mental health, we have 2 members of staff on call 24/7/365 (on of which is a mental health clinician) so it made sense for our graduates to have continued use of that resource? After all, if they had already accessed that support whilst training they would have a shorthand to access the same level of support once they'd graduated.  As our entire pastoral policy is a clinician based system it allowed them to jump back into talking therapies etc as and when they needed it. I've never understood the idea of sessions with a counsellor being time-limited anyway. How awful to start talking to someone, open up that can of worms, only to be told that your 6 sessions are up. Your counselling and/or therapy surely needs to last for as long as you need it?

In a poorly researched blog about The MTA last year I read somebody state that this was an unrealistic vision. They stated that we were a business not a 'community outreach programme' (I might be paraphrasing somewhat, but that was the general gist of the article). Yet my vision of the sort of college that I wanted to open extended way beyond the 2-year model that I had devised. I felt that looking after the graduates was a core belief that we had to achieve.  It's an interesting take isn't it to call an institution out for genuinely trying to help? Yet to me it was always a no brainer. 

We don't really start learning until we're out on the job, yet we all need somewhere to go and ask those questions that couldn't have possibly been known about on the course (as each job and each company will pose their own questions). Very often it's after college that all the self-doubt starts setting in. Prior to opening The MTA I had been told that 95% of graduates drop out of the industry within 5 years, and I completely understood that, as every day is a chore at the beginning isn't it (unless you're lucky enough to walk straight into a nice contract)?

 

I didn't want my lot paying all the money to train with us, but then change careers before they'd given it their best shot. I just wanted them to earn their fees back really.  However in order to help them to achieve that I felt that 'we' should be the parachute. Actually more than that - I felt that we were obliged to be their parachute.

Inherent in the vision for The MTA from the outset was ongoing support. 

As the years moved on our #college4life tag has become something of an in-joke to myself and the students, as it truly is more than just a social media hashtag. It's a lived reality if you chose for it to be so.  It's also helped to create an amazingly vibrant community outside of the day to day college. Our graduates are known to the current students (in reality all their pictures are up on the walls, so they are very present at all times). Lots of them come back at various intervals to take part in classes. It can be a successful reboot if that's what you feel like you need. Or maybe you've just missed a weekly sing-song, so you can nip into the whole college choral class and get those endorphins racing around again. 

Since 2012 our graduation has evolved into a thing called a Gradunion. A mixture of a celebration for the new graduates entering the industry, combined with a reunion for those that have gone before. Last year's 10th anniversary Gradunion was particularly glorious, with nearly half of our graduates returning to celebrate both the arrival of the new lot and the college milestone. 

The raft of well-meaning support projects to support the #coronagrads has really wound me up this year. Not because of all the things that are going on, as each and every project is brilliant and being supported by so many generous people and organisations. However, those students have paid money to institutions to fundamentally get them to the finishing line. To kick start their careers, to enable them to graduate. I obviously understand that these are unprecedented times, after all, there is barely a moment in the day where somebody doesn't use that very word BUT it is up to all businesses to adapt and fulfil our obligations (both contractual and moral) as best as we can. It is not up to the kind hearts in our industry to take up the slack.  

Whilst every day at the moment we're seeing colleges come up with really inventive ways to enable them to showcase their students albeit virtually right now, we're also seeing a lot of colleges and universities not bothering. Literally graduates online begging for help. Where's the colleges' contractual obligation in all of this?

We all need a 'parachute' when we leave training, and in truth, I fundamentally believe that your fees should pay for it (although I know that this is a rather unique thought). However as a bare minimum, we need to ensure that our graduates have a back pack full of tools that will equip them in our industry - they shouldn't be on social media trying to work things out. 

Mental Illness is more than just depression

Last year I was really honoured to be asked to give one of the keynote speeches at Equity's first ArtsMind Symposium. I had been invited to discuss the journey that I had been on whilst initiating the #time4change Mental Health Charter, and I also got to discuss the highs and lows of running a college that is taking a whole school approach to mental health.

BAPAM had recently published their consultation paper about the mental health difficulties our industry faces and had also made some recommendations about a more productive and helpful way to move forward. Interestingly they were recommending a whole school approach as the most effective, and also discussed the possibility of moving towards a clinician lead system in drama colleges.  The MTA has only ever operated with such a system, so it was interesting to discuss the realities of this (The MTA now being in its 11th year). The synopsis was this really - early intervention is key, and by getting our community to understand that mental health is no different to physical health, we could help to prevent or decrease a personal mental health crisis. See the physio when you first suspect that there's an injury, and you're more likely to make a quicker (and often stronger) recovery, see a mental health specialist when you first recognise some symptoms and the same rules apply.  The difficulty being of course that most of us recognise early signs of physical illnesses, but very few of us recognise early signs of mental illnesses. Indeed that was the entire point of the charter - to get those symptoms (and maladaptive coping mechanisms) more widely known.

Within my speech though I also spoke at length at how I felt that the mental health conversation had gotten sideswiped by the conversation around wellbeing.  I noted that having campaigned for 6 years to have a more honest conversation about mental health, somehow in the past year or so the conversation had been sanitised. As great as it was to see more and more people recognising their own struggles and indeed naming them as part of their process, or as a way to get 'the message' out there, the conversation had taken an interesting diversion, and one which I felt wasn't particularly helpful.

Mental Health had somehow turned into Wellbeing and in doing so we had lost Mental Illnesses within the discussion. A social media statement about a bad anxiety day usually turned into a list of people saying that it would be OK, that they were around if that person needed somebody to talk to, or people just sharing their own mental health struggles in a bid I suspect to show the original poster that they were not alone. What I noted though was that it was unusual to see a possible solution in the replies. It was rare to see a response asking whether the person had checked in with their doctor. For a surprisingly large number of mental illnesses, you can expect to live in a symptom-free world. Yet the answers to the posts didn't have that expectation or offer up that hope.

Wellbeing was everywhere. For every great mental health article there would be one stating that the 'cure' was much simpler than people realised. One of my students actually wrote a great ranting post about how if it really was as simple as eating a healthier diet (for example), don't you think that they would have tried it? The reality was much harsher, and by 'helpfully' sharing the Daily Mail's latest take on 'How to cure depression' they were actually unwittingly sharing a belief that mental illnesses were avoidable. That it was a weakness of the person, as opposed to a genetic, chemical or environmental cause.

Then somebody else pointed out to me the dangers of these articles. For somebody who is seriously unwell and who has potentially lost their grasp on reality, reading all these 'cures' was actually feeding the illness not satisfying a cure. As they limped from article to article believing that each one would 'make them feel OK', they were also getting more and more unwell.

I noted in my speech that we had completely whitewashed the ugly side of mental illness. How self-destructive it can be, how an illness can almost manipulate a person's personality to make decisions that they would never make when well. Some illness really do take over the person's personality - we've seen it time and time again at college, as people slowly alienate themselves from their friends because reality is moving further and further away from them. I could go on - but you get the picture.

Mental illnesses don't manifest themselves in the way that many people think. The critically depressed person isn't necessarily the one that's telling you that they're low - indeed they're more likely to be the one that's telling you that they're fine. Anxiety isn't just about feeling worried - the physical symptoms are often more debilitating. Basically what I'm saying is what we see on people's social media might be a manifestation of something rather serious going on for somebody, so maybe it's better to say nothing rather than piling on to tell whoever that they're damaging everybody else's mental health. Maybe right now they are so fragile we should just leave them be (as hard as that is).

Our words are powerful and whilst a statement can often feel like an empowering thing to do I wonder if it is? Report accounts to the relevant complaint handles then just block them. Don't go back to see what they've done 'this time' . . . walk away from it. Do we have to announce that we've blocked or reported someone? Do we have to encourage others to do the same? Could we all just use our own autonomy and trust that others will do the same? If it's really bad and you feel really strongly about it, could you sound your battle cry offline? Literally, the world is vulnerable right now, so it doesn't take much encouragement for us all to rush to 'protect' people or in our case an industry that is struggling. However, there's a difference between the lone warrior and the organised hate groups.

We are all throwing the 'Be Kind' hashtag around, whilst very often have forgotten to do the same ourselves. Many people will discuss the impact of a feud on their own mental health, but what 'if' the person that your fighting against is ill and you just don't recognise those symptoms? For sure even an ill person can take responsibility for their actions and their words (unless they're psychotic), but can you be sure that your response won't tip them over the edge? Is the defence of 'well they're not being kind' a valid excuse for us to stoop to their level?

Words matter right now probably more than ever. . . but remaining curious to the possibility of the ugly side of mental illness might make a big difference too.

Stay safe

So. . . I now run an online college?

The MTA's strange academic year worked out well in terms of the CoronaVirus lockdown. We were incredibly lucky that we managed to complete our 5 performance run of our flagship revue show - Something Old, Something New.  Whilst it's important to note that it's not our Showcase, it is an important production to start introducing our graduating year to the industry.

However, our timeframe did mean that we were able to chat with our students before we ended the term and reassure them in person about how we were going to run an online college if the UK did follow the rest of the world and get put into lockdown. We were even able to chat through roughly how it might work.  We were lucky - 2 days later that's exactly what started to happen. Even though we were then on holiday I did a quick live stream to our private group to remind them not to panic as we'd already spoken about what would happen.


I don't know about anybody else, but I must confess I never had a backup pandemic plan up my sleeve ready for a global shutdown, and with no tech department to help me, I think that I undertook the biggest learning curve of my life (and I thought that I'd already made that journey when I opened the 'real' college 11 years ago). However, I had just 2 weeks to create The MTA Online. One of the things that I felt would work in my favour was that when I created 'the other MTA' back in 2008 I had consciously created a course that I could run and monitor remotely. The idea being that after the college was up and running I could go back on tour and continue to run the college in between my 'real work' as an MD*. The college has a policy that all staff have to be currently working, so the online infrastructure was actually already in place and part of our everyday life.  Our classnote system is online, the timetable is online, there's not a day that goes by where we're not communicating with them via private groups, etc. So it was just the actual teaching to sort out <gulp>

So then it was hitting each problem in order of urgency. The priority was to ensure that all the agent 1:1 auditions could at least be offered in an online format.  So I first made friends with Zoom. What a fast-moving world we all live in isn't it? Suddenly we're all speaking about meeting up in zoom, yet most of us had no bloody clue about it before the pandemic.

The majority of agencies immediately agreed to move their auditions with our graduates online, so that was my first relief moment. We wanted to reassure the students as quickly as possible (even though they don't graduate until September I was aware that they were seeing all the #UK2020grad posts going up which were bound to make them anxious even though they were not in the same position as those graduates that had lost their showcase), so back I went online to live stream some more reassurance. I felt that it was important to be 'present' as opposed to just posting notices.

The next job - was to move our 100% vocational course online.  Finally, after a few years of really fighting against the 'establishment' because I've refused to turn our course into a formal qualification (because our industry is vocational and therefore it's the training that's important not the piece of paper in terms of getting you into the audition room), The MTA came into its own. We could literally rewrite the course to ensure that this would be a valuable term for our students. I was so mindful that they were still paying their fees so I had an obligation to give them value for money albeit in a different way. I was also mindful that our industry had literally had the rug pulled from under it. The MTA has a faculty of very loyal freelancers - the very people that had completely lost their income. So I wanted to try and help to support as many of them as possible too. After all, a college is only as strong as its students AND faculty.  I felt that there was a moral obligation to try to help (if possible)

So emails were sent out explaining that we were going online, and if they wanted to continue to teach for us, they needed to work out how to run online classes. My only stipulation was that the classes had to be interactive. I felt that videoed classes wouldn't allow us to watch and correct the students in real-time, and therefore not achieve the aims of the course which would, in turn, impact the progression that we needed the students to make this term (pandemic or not)

Suddenly I had an entire faculty on the learning curve with me. With that cog working away in the background next up we had to move our auditions online for our 2020 intake. Once again I didn't see the value of them sending in a self-tape as we wanted to work with them, we wanted to interact with them. The MTA's whole day audition is all about getting to know the people, not just the talent. Cue several senior faculty zoom meetings as we worked out how best to run the online audition. Suddenly lockdown was our friend, as when we needed volunteers to help us work it out we were never short of students and graduates willing to pop into the 'virtual' room to help us try out our latest idea.  A plan was formed, the auditionees were notified and before we knew it my senior faculty and myself were all in a virtual room with several complete strangers.

This turned out to be our lightbulb day though. Whilst for sure there were limitations online, it also offered up so many great things. In many ways, we actually preferred the online audition, and it's certainly going to prompt a serious discussion once the dust has settled about how we audition people moving forward. We already offer a free online first-round audition in a bid to save people money, maybe there's a way to move the main audition online permanently - saving them a fortune in travel & often accommodation. Maybe we could offer both options? I don't know. . . but definitely watch this space.

Having experienced a few hours in the 'virtual' college, we all started to realise that there were endless possibilities that we could explore. The MTA does a 50/50 stage/screen split anyway, so actually working with a lens between us offers us lots of opportunities to explore. We live in a world where more and more auditions are via self-tapes. What an amazing chance we had to really focus on all of this stuff.

The dance staff met up and all were confident that they could offer worthwhile online dance classes, voice, and acting were easy to transfer online. Strangely enough, singing was the hardest area, as whilst 1:1 singing lessons could happen with ease, group singing is just not feasible in our 4G world.  After much asking around it seemed like my only option was for the students to mute their mics and sing to a screen? Our students are not singing for pleasure, they are singing to enhance their skill set, we're looking at the nuances of group singing. They might have been blending beautifully, their harmony line might have been divine - but the tutor would never know. However, we did know that the 1:1 stuff worked really well.

Still on holiday we had another live-streamed chat with our students (& graduates. . . as we have a college for life policy and therefore I needed to check in with them too), and as part of our 'checking in with your mental health' chat, we were chatting about what people could do during this lockdown, and lots of people started chatting about learning to play 'that instrument' that has sat in their room for years but they've never had the time to learn it. Cue the next idea. We are not an actor-muso course, nor do we aspire to be, however we all know that instrumental skills are incredibly useful to a performer. So a quick check who could gain access to a guitar to check that my plan would be worth it - and suddenly 75% of the college are now having weekly guitar lessons. Learning in streamed groups expect to see something spectacular at next year's revue (she jokes, but not really).  Then a group came to me as they had access to a keyboard, could we teach them how to play the piano? We're currently putting this in place.

In our senior faculty meeting, we were chatting about the fact that literally, everybody was available right now - so we should try to get some good Q&As and masterclasses going, as they'd work well with this format. It would also mean that our students always had something to look forward to. Days and weeks of lockdown monotony were going to hit hard. We needed to offer them something to be excited about. What an amazing opportunity this online term was going to offer us. Of course, being online meant that we weren't limited to UK guests - so off I hopped over to Broadway (virtually of course), and with the help of our friends, we suddenly found ourselves with one hell of a term. Q&As with film directors, Dexter Fletcher & Joe Wright, writer David Eldridge returns to the college, masterclasses with Cassidy Janson & Annalene Beechey, Q&As with Broadway stars Claybourne Elder, Laura Osnes, Julia Murney, Kara Lindsay, with West End stars Adam Garcia and Louise Dearman, plus meetings with producers, casting directors, resident directors AND a private screening of the Desperately Seeking The Exit thanks to the ever marvelous Peter Michael Marino. . . and. . . well, who knows? 

We're on day 3 and already we've discovered new things, but again because we're completely independent we can implement new ideas within hours. From an 'oh no' term, we're seeing our Pandemic Term as an 'OMG we could do this too...  .' sort of term.

My virtual office stays open for a while after regular classes, so students and graduates can pop in if they're struggling or just to say hello. Our mental health clinician is still available to the entire college 24/7/365 and is of course now just offering online or phone sessions, but it does mean that our lot (& staff) have instant access to a mental health professional if the lockdown is particularly hard for them. 

So that's it, within the space of just 2 weeks . . . I now run an online college. I sit in mission control for hours on end looking at screens, opening up zoom rooms, and planning. What else can we do? Maybe I'll revisit this blog at the end of the Pandemic Term to see if it was really as exciting as we currently think that it's got the potential to be.

Stay safe all 

*this never happened. Turns out running a college is really busy