They Saved The MTA

19th July 7pm announced publicly that we were closing The MTA in September 2021. This was not a ploy, it was a heartbreaking reality.

29th July midday announced that somehow we had been 'saved'. In just 10 days the darkest day of The MTA turned into the brightest day. We're under no illusions that we're saved for good - but we are safe long enough to allow the class of 2022 to graduate, and for the past 3 to 4 months that's all we were trying to do. We have plans and supporters in place to work with us to secure a better future for the college, but we'll be taking it one step at a time. Of course the intention is to keep going - but we set out to do one thing first.

In the last 10 days, though we've seen instalives packed with MT royalty supporting the #savetheMTA campaign, we've seen a Go Fund Me campaign raised at the last look over £16k, we've had offers of support both financial and in kind. I've spoken more to Chairman Jon Harris than I have to my wife, as we worked our way through the various obstacles and aids that were thrown at us.

I've been reminded time and time again that my poor self-esteem really can't handle compliments. I've been taken on countless trips down Memory Lane, with past students and staff, lots of those trips were just sheer laughter, a couple of sheer horror but quite a few of them were devastatingly humbling.

I've been reminded (as if I needed it actually) that I have an amazing group of friends that really 'get me', who know when to back off, and exactly when to parachute in with words of wisdom. My family are my heroes.

I spent half the week emailing people telling them that things had been canceled, and terminating contracts, whilst the latter part of the week emailing them back to say that things were all back on.

To say that I'm reeling is an understatement. However, most of all I feel a huge sense of relief. Carrying the stress of the past year has taken a tremendous toll on me. That old work/life balance definitely needs adjusting, but suddenly the college once again has a sense of possibility and hope about it, as opposed to a sense of inevitability. 

Over the past year, the pandemic had almost forced the wider MTA community apart. Not so fulfilling to pop into a zoom room as it is to pop into a Green Room. Whilst every so often we'd all come together for some online event or another it did feel like it had drifted. However, once the closure announcement was made those ambassadors were just phenomenal. I had spent the best part of the year sad for my 1st years because they had no sense of the greater MTA community when suddenly they all parachuted down to help out of nowhere.

I've kept saying this but The MTA is not the only independent drama college focussing on vocational training. There's a few of us about, and we're all being sold out by the industry's gatekeepers and that really needs to change. We're going to keep doing our thing because we know that it works, and from the outpouring of support we've had over the last 10 days it seems obvious that quite a few people agree with us. We've consciously not issued press releases - predominantly because I loathe how in recent years The Stage has noticeably changed direction from the 'we'll support everyone' stance that we used to know and love into the 'we'll only talk about the Federation of Drama Schools' as if there's nothing else out there. Well let's just call it shall we - as a lot of those colleges are currently undertaking internal investigations on really serious allegations, but The Stage still reveres the ground that they walk on.  The Stage (and Equity) should be campaigning to regulate the UK training industry. Instead, everybody stays quiet.

They are our industry newspaper and have done next to nothing to highlight and campaign about the lack of provision in vocational training, just like Equity have done nothing. Too many 'old boys' looking after the 'old boys' for my liking. Plus now that they've added these ridiculous clickbait headlines to social media posts knowing full well that the articles are behind a paywall . . . well I'm done with pretending that that's OK.  We've called it out a few times over the closure, and it's been interesting to see others call it out too. Well, we're done with being quiet with this stuff moving forward. Things really do need to change.

That said, and rant over, for now, I'm going to take some time to finish off this academic year, regroup, reset then move forward. The path ahead though doesn't feel as lonely as usual. 

Expect the Unexpected

 Every year when a new intake joins the college we ask our graduates and 2nd years if they have any advice for the newbies. Without fail one person will always say that to 'survive' #theMTAway they need to expect the unexpected. Now to qualify that really quickly - what they're referring to is our penchant of springing surprise auditions on them all the time. We do it to train our students not to be afraid of auditions, to almost see them as a game. Successful or not, just to have taken part means that it was an audition 'banked'. None of us ever know when the payout of that deposit will be, but if you did your prep, it will eventually pay you back.

Well, this week's event has made me really reflect on that phrase. Monday was truly horrific. Since the Board voted not to run next year late on Friday evening, it's fair to say that my weekend was . . . difficult. I still had a show left to finish writing, and it's REALLY hard trying to write a comedy when you're living in your own private hell. Just to make 2021 really perfect, just a matter of days earlier I had also been home to Wales to attend the funeral of a really close relative. It had been one of those tragic diagnosed one week died 2 weeks later sort of scenarios. With my wife looking after the children I ended up locking myself away in the office for the weekend writing, grieving and stunned actually. 

In a bid to support our students when we broke the news I was flagged by Jon Harris, the Chair of our Board, Sam Hull, a Trustee but also one of our original cohort (so she'd been there on the day that the college opened), plus faculty members Josh Mathieson (Head of Voice/VP), Giles Taylor (Deputy Head of Acting) and Tilly Vosburgh (Head of Acting who had literally ubered across to us after finishing a morning shoot).

The next hour was a blur really, emails scheduled to go out to incoming students, staff, supporters, 2 year groups to tell, a social media live in a private group to tell our graduates. Here's what I do remember though - the first years whilst devastated were instantly galvanised into a group of action, even though the situation was desperate we still managed to find things to laugh about (a very important MTA trait). The irony that they had literally just finished a MT class looking at rep only to discover that the song of the day had been "Tell Me It's Not True"? I mean WTAF? 

The 2nd years were equally stunned, but recognised instantly that they were in many way unaffected by the decision (other than the lack of free dance classes moving forward), so immediately after we finished explaining the situation to them - their response? They asked to go across to the other studio to support their friends in the first year. It was as beautiful as it was devastatingly painful to watch.

Then this is when it all changed - as I had made the decision to personally tell our graduates (college for life and all that, so we have regular contact with them, and this was far too important to just send an email). I nipped into their private FB group to go live and tell them (I should add that the only other time that I've ever done that actually was when it was announced that the UK was closing down for a global pandemic, and we went live in all our groups to reassure them and tell them that we were around to support them).  As with our students, we explained our financial position in detail as we're always transparent with our students, yet even when I made it clear that we were looking to find stupid money very quickly, they were instantly galvanised to try and help.

By that evening a group calling themselves "The MTA Community" has started a Go Fund Me, we had already been contacted about the potential of some larger donations, and by the time the news went public at 7pm it felt like this kamikaze juggernaut that I'd been trying to steer for the last few months had already been taken away from me, with a whole group of people suddenly attempting to steer it instead. 

It was a conscious decision to put out our statement on our own terms via our social media channels, as for quite some time now it's been evident that our industry press has a clear bias supporting the Federation of Drama Schools, and their clickbait social media headlines invariably belie the story of the articles held behind a paywall. We had nothing to hide and A LOT to say, and we wanted the full story out there.  Whilst we felt that it was too late for us, we know that we're not the only college struggling with policy decisions designed to push out true vocational training.

Never in a million years did I think that our post would have the reaction that it did. We felt that we were such an insignificant cog in this beast of an industry that we would be gifted the dignity to slide away quietly. I was aware that we had facilitated change in the training industry, especially around all the mental health stuff, but even that felt like it had been sidelined recently having heard the absolute horror stories that were spilling out in the media. Organisations that had signed up to the #time4change mental health charter had clearly done nothing more than offered lip service to it given what else was alleged to have been going on in these colleges.

How wrong we were.  As people that work with me know I'm fastidious about responding to messages instantly, invoices are literally paid on receipt as I just like to keep on top of my work. However, there was no way that I could keep on top of this. Once I've finished this I've got some serious catching up to do.

We still don't know what's going to happen, we still haven't secured all the funding that we need, however, we have now said that IF we did reach our £250K goal which would enable us to end the course properly for our current first years, we would also run one more first-year group, only this time with no guarantee of a 2nd year, and as the £250K is essentially paying for "ghost seats" for the students that we failed to attract, we committed to filling those seats with disadvantaged students who would never usually be able to afford a vocational college. We'll hold auditions for a diverse group of students who would like to train #theMTAway for a year. They'd get to do 3 shows with us if nothing else. 

My only unfulfilled dream around The MTA was to find a way to fund 50% of our places with 50% funding already in place. Maybe, just maybe our final year would finally allow me to reach that goal. A bittersweet irony, but a hugely gratifying one at that.

The story goes on. . . . 

Here's a link to the Go Fund Me page: https://uk.gofundme.com/f/save-the-mta

End of an Era

 When you're forced to close a business, you're also forced to be self-reflective to work out what went wrong. Over the past few months as the seriousness of The MTA's position became ever clearer to me I've done nothing but self reflect.  The obvious answer really must be that the course didn't work - after all, if it did we'd have people queuing outside the door to come and train with us, except that in many ways we did have those people queuing up - but they all turned away when they found out that our course came with no funding stream. It didn't matter how much we'd try to reassure them that we'd find a way to make it work for them, we know for a fact that it stopped people auditioning.

This dichotomy of running a college that clearly worked - 100% of students securing agent representation is no mean feat when you're not massaging your figures with signings with associated agencies. In total we trained 193 students through to graduation, and a further 15 were trained up to the end of their first year.  When I opened the college I was told that 95% of our graduates would drop out of the industry within 5 years.  I always vowed to base our success on the longevity of the careers that we created. Pre-pandemic a staggering 78% of our graduates were still in the industry with 23% of those having secured West End or No 1 touring contracts. However that's just the PR headline, as the reality is even richer, our graduates went on to perform all over the world, from Lapland to the USA (via China, Malaysia, Australia), working at the National, the RSC, West End, International tours, open-air theatres, schools, community theatre, on screens big and small.

Hard to see the place as a failure when you're looking at the evidence, isn't it?

So where did we go wrong? We stuck to the idea that vocational training was enough to get you a career, we didn't buy into the Tory-inspired myth that people needed a qualification to succeed in our industry. We invested in the students, not in the system. That ultimately was our downfall. With no desire to expand, the business model literally involved securing enough students year after year to train with us. We had various plans in place for low numbered year groups so we plodded along quite nicely. However, in 2019 with the demise of the PCDL, it became harder to recruit students as we suddenly had no funding attached at all. We saw the drop of applicants instantly during the 2020 'audition season'.  We started to explore other options but these things take time, so when we were suddenly facing Brexit (20% of our students tended to come from the EU, but we would no longer be permitted to train them), and then Covid right on top of it, all the wheels that we had started to put in action ground to a halt.

We had exhausted our evaluation of moving to a degree model when we realised that to successfully do that we would need to change our course in order to make it financially viable as we could only realise a certain amount of government funding. It was suggested that we could introduce the idea of a reading week (thereby saving us money), or dropping some of the performances, or putting private study time in - basically filling the course with non-contact hours in order to save money, but at the expense of the training. Then we explored taking on extra students in order to make up the deficit that we would hit should we end up running a degree course which didn't give us the option of adding a top-up. Of course, by taking that route we would once again be diluting the students' training - so we just wouldn't do it. However even if we'd opted to sell out that much in order to secure a degree status course we knew that the timeframes involved in all that (pointless) bureaucracy would be too long, and the pandemic pushed those timeframes ever longer.

We were mid exploring applying to get approved for a named diploma. Whilst we'd gone down this route once before, we were stopped by their criteria of only considering 3-year courses. This time though we pursued it and were negotiating the changing of the wording of that one sentence, setting the criteria at minimum hours/year as opposed to naming the length of the course. The organisation was definitely up for it but needed to discuss it fully as a Board themselves as this was a major change for them. That meeting still hasn't happened over a year later. . . as of course covid has meant that other things have had to get prioritised.

To give you an idea of the timeframes involved, all of this was going on (including independent consultations) whilst we had been forced like every other UK college to put our training online. Even writing that reminds me of the stress that we were under at the time. Desperately restructuring the course to ensure that our students still made progress during 2 terms of online training, attempting our best to pastorally support them all, plus try to strategise how we could protect the college against the oncoming juggernaut of Brexit just 2 years after the demise of the PCDL. 

Of course, as the 2021 audition season kicked off the world felt a little less certain after months of lockdowns, so we weren't surprised when the applications slowly came in as opposed to all land together as they did every other year. The expectation was of course that we'd get later applications once things were more normal. The Christmas Covid wave was on its way - who the hell would be applying for college then? As the applications started to trickle in we also saw a much larger percentage than normal of withdrawals - even before coming to the audition. Now, this was a new pattern for us. On one of our audition days literally, 2/3rds of the applicants withdrew at the last minute. We'd been forced to move their audition date when we went into lockdown in January, but this was still really unusual.

As we always audition late we usually get a steady stream of applications from May-August each year, in fact, several times in our history it was the August auditions that proved to provide us with a large percentage of our year group. However, those applications just never materialised this year. Then when all the applicants dropped out of our June audition date (again, a first for us), it was clear that things were really bad and potentially critical. Board meetings were hurriedly called in a bid to update but also brainstorm new ideas. Friends of the college started to lend their expertise (very generously I must add) in a bid to see what was going on, the marketing spend increased, hell I even gave up 2.5 months going live on social media 4 times a week in a bid to remind people that we were here and still auditioning. Literally, nothing worked.

Other friends came on board with suggestions of where we could raise charitable donations in a bid to support our class of 2022 to finish their year (with the hope that this was just a 'perfect storm' situation, but next year would be better). A call to action was sent out to everyone and anyone we could think of, but of the 40 or so emails that I sent out we had just one reply, and whilst that person offered a donation, it was clear that we weren't going to hit our figure, or indeed get anywhere near it.  In truth when it came down the fact that we were going to need to raise the funds I knew that we were stuffed. Over the last 3 years we'd undertaken a brilliant fundraising feasibility study, the consultants involved felt sure that we would be able to raise a regular amount of money/year in order to fulfil my dream of running a college where 50% of the places were funded. Yet a couple of brilliant fundraisers later, and a load of rejected applications, and it was quickly evident that people weren't interested in independent colleges. How many times did I read that sentence "we've already allocated our funds to other institutions" only to see the same old names come up time and time again.

We were aware of the ticking clock of the end of the academic year which meant that students would be putting down deposits on houses for the next year, plus of course starting to pay for their 2nd year (or 1st year) So it was at this point that the Board had to make the devastating decision to close as if we didn't close we would run out of money by March.  The business model could not support the size of the year that we had coming in, and the business model of the course was never designed around just one year group (well. . . other than our first year obviously).

So a week ago I had to start making calls to other colleges to try and secure an alternative for our first years. I mean how bloody horrific for your college to close in the middle of your training, but also how horrific to be planning your new London life at your drama college only to get the rug pulled from beneath you 3 months before? Knowing that we were letting down 22 students was by far the hardest part of this journey. Also going into college to work with them whilst knowing that things were not looking great was horrible, and definitely not a position that I'd ever want myself to be in again, and in fairness I wasn't scheduled that much during the first few weeks anyway as I was also trying to write a show whilst this real life drama was unfolding. The only thing I could think of to soften that blow was to try and secure them places at another college.  I am indebted to Leo at Associated Studios who firstly didn't just try to grab the money when I called her, but first offered to sit down with me to see if there was anything that we could do to save the college, but then secondly reassured me that as another 2 year MT course in London she could take on our lot if they chose that option. This of course meant that they could continue their training together. Obviously, it's up to them whether they take this option, but I'm so relieved that the option was offered to them. Plus thanks to Louise at PPA and Adrian at LSMT for also agreeing to see any of our students that were interested in their courses. So nothing here is ideal, but at least there were 3 concrete alternatives being proposed to the 22 students most impacted by this and indeed 2 of those options were considerably cheaper than us, and potentially came with government funding attached.

. . . and so we're here with the announcement of our closure. 

As you can imagine there is so much more to sort out now, and the next few months are going to be difficult for all of us I'm sure. Why the blog? Because I need to remind myself right now quite how hard I fought to save the college that I set up in 2009. I need to hold onto the reality that I really tried everything to save it.  100% I failed, but as no doubt I'll cover in another blog (now that this one is out of my head), there's been a massive shift in the training industry this year, and I think that we're going to see a very different landscape emerging over the next few years unless somebody starts to regulate it.

A Funding Crisis

 This week Yale School of Drama was able to announce that thanks to a donation by David Geffen all of their training would be free from September onwards.  I facetiously and blindly optimistically retweeted the article with the comment that my DMs were open in case any UK philanthropist equally wanted to make such a generous and life-changing gesture. You won't be surprised to learn that my DMs have been relatively quiet ever since.

However, there is a major issue around philanthropy and indeed supporting the arts in this country. Oh for sure the usual suspects literally throw money at the same old colleges and they all continue to build and rebuild their spaces, ensuring that the benefactor's name will live on in bricks and mortar form. 

I've always found it really sad that a donation worth millions was spent on a building as opposed to supporting more underprivileged people training for nothing. Of course, a nice theatre is great, but investing in people always seems a preferable option to me. Saying that. . . most of those same colleges are also on the elite DaDa list, so why get benefactors to sponsor their students when the government will do that anyway?

The MTA opened in 2009 and we have constantly been chasing our tail to find supporters that would invest in our students. Over the years we've had a few - notably the Take That Trust Fund that supported us for the first couple of years until our students were eligible for a PCDL.

Now the Professional Career and Development Loan was nowhere near as generous as a regular undergraduate loan but it was something, and actually, something that facilitated a lot of our students training with us. Knowing that a large chunk of their training made the rest more accessible. It was only £10k (and our course is £32k), but it allowed us to massively reduce our instalment plan so more people could access it.

Then, as I've written about countless times before, in 2019 they stopped the PCDL literally overnight. Suddenly there was no help at all available to a performer that chose to train at a 100% vocational college. Other than a small article in The Stage nobody shouted about its demise. Nobody cared that this lifeline for vocational training had been stopped. Of course, fast forward to this year when the government started discussing reducing the funding for performing arts degrees and we had petitions the lot

Once again let me contextualise this for you some more - literally any university can suddenly start up a performers degree course (and check through UCAS, literally anybody does), their students can do no shows, spend as little as 16 hrs/week in lessons led by tutors, the lack of contact time alone on their course means that they graduate not eligible to even get onto the Spotlight directory - but those students are given access to a loan of up to £27k. They are literally being trained for nothing (both financially and career-wise). The government finance is not based on the results of the course, but rather the piece of paper that says degree is worth £27k of our money to train these wannabe performers. Lots of the courses don't even audition their students - they accept them on grades only.

Now I've worked at some of these colleges and I've seen for myself how shocking the training is. I've seen 3rd year graduates who literally don't know their way around a rehearsal room, unable to warm up, unable to understand a basic theatrical language - and yet these students also told me that they were going to work in the West End once they'd graduated. They were lovely, kind but clueless. They raved about their courses, but of course, they knew no better. Check out some of the posts on various Facebook groups if you think that things can't be that bad. If you've just paid £27k to be trained you should not be asking in the group how to get an agent, how to find work.

Then jump to our course at The MTA. Our students do 40 contact hours/week, they put on a production every term, they exclusively work with top industry professionals, they all graduate (to date anyway) with an agent. . . and they now get zero funding.

Then let's look briefly at how else some of the colleges make their dosh. Overseas students are a massive earner for them. They mark up the price and recruit from abroad - after all, it seems like you can't pay enough for a UK education in the arts. As they are all offering degrees this source of income has not been hit by Brexit at all - they can still fleece the overseas students, no questions asked.

Now we've always had a great tradition of training EU students (due to being a vocational college we were never permitted to sponsor a visa for any other overseas student). Controversially we always charged our EU students exactly the same as our UK students - after all it didn't cost us any more to train them, and we loved the diversity of culture that they brought into the college. Fast forward to Brexit and we are no longer permitted to train anybody without a UK passport. . . . but the college offering just 16 hrs of training a week can continue as normal?

Over the past year and a half, we've been exploring all of our options in an attempt to get some funding for our students. Covid has made this task particularly hard as all the various departments stopped accepting applications for anything. We explored turning our course into the UK's first accelerated degree in musical theatre (stage and screen). We brought in consultants who agreed that we were easily working at the right level, and discussed ways in which we could stay true to ourselves and not sell out (I remain adamantly against this idea of private study when students are paying course fees), but this was to be a long drawn out process, and covid meant that we couldn't even start the process. We explored the idea of a degree franchise (which in truth I'd never even heard of). Now, this was a positive thing as it was felt that if we found the right uni to work with, we could be offering this by Oct 2021. . . except for one thing - our fees would drop from £16k/student to £9k. We already budget within an inch of our lives as it is because we know that our course is only so successful because we only take a max of 22 students/year. There was no way that we could run or even adapt our course to make it work on £9k/student. We'd have to stop all first-year performances and probably a couple of the 2nd year ones too . . . which would mean that our students would be financed but they wouldn't be industry-ready.

So we looked at the Trinity Diploma as an option, after all that does come with some funding these days in the form of an Advanced Learners Loan. However, you might recall some years ago when I moaned about this then. . . one of the first criteria that they list is that the course must be 3 years. We're out of the loop before we even got on the ride.  Not one to be deterred though (and knowing that Brexit was looming) we started to liaise with Trinity to see if there was any desire to change that wording at all - and glory be. . . there was. They agreed that in terms of hours, outcome, standard we appeared to be doing it all (obviously subject to a proper inspection etc). They would have a meeting to discuss rewording that one clause. Unfortunately, thanks to covid that meeting still hasn't happened, and indeed is unlikely to happen for a few more months.

The government department that handles the ALL won't even consider funding a course that is attached to one establishment. 

So to recap literally any university can start a Musical Theatre degree and will get access to instant funding, no questions asked, they can automatically accept students from anywhere in the world (and charge them a premium) - nobody checks whether their students are industry-ready at the end of the course. Their degree, that piece of paper, those marks are enough to open the government's coffers to support training.  You might recall that I explored the impact of vocational training turning into degree cash cows a while back

Our course - the first of its kind in the UK, which used to be eligible for a PCDL (a loan that we had to apply to be eligible for, and in order to access it, we had to prove that our course worked), is now eligible for literally nothing. Our students work 40 hours a week with us, 100% of them have secured independent agent representation before graduating. In 2019 pre-covid, our stats were that 78% of our graduates were still in the industry, 22% of those had secured West End or No 1 touring contracts, at the time of the survey all but one of our graduates had secured a professional job after graduating (and the one that hadn't had emigrated within a month or two from graduating). In other words, we have really proved that the course works. . . .yet our students get nothing.

So you'd think that we'd be eligible for various bursaries for our students wouldn't you? Organisations that would really value vocational training eg Equity and Spotlight who together with SOLT offer some really decent bursaries, after all our students are permitted to join both organisations once they've graduated. . . but nope. They won't allow our students into that club as we don't offer a degree. So that money goes to the colleges that have access to DaDas, student loans, and benefactors who build them new theatres.

We have students at the moment desperately trying to fund their training with us, students who are really talented but don't have the good fortune to come from a wealthy background. The recent interview with Michael Sheen really nails this idea of luck and the injustice of who gets the luxury of choosing to study performing these days.

So where are the UK's Michael Geffen's? Where are the philanthropists that genuinely want to invest in people and not buildings with their names on it. How the hell are we ever to change this landscape? As ever . . . my DMs are open