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. 

A Whole School Approach to Mental Health

When I opened The MTA back in 2009 there was no name for the kind of pastoral policy that we were going to implement. However having worked in vocational training for over 20 years I knew that drama college seemed to involve an awful lot of crying. I hadn't met a singing teacher who couldn't relate to a 'crying student' anecdote.  I knew that I couldn't open a college without a counsellor (having spent the previous few years working in colleges which failed to provide this service).

By way of a fluke actually, the person that I asked to take on the role happened to be a mental health nurse specialist, who was also (by virtue of her day job) an extremely successful life coach. I realised early on that by making the counsellor a key person in the faculty, as opposed to an 'add-on', students would be more likely to engage in using her. I also felt it important that they could self-refer, as opposed to going through a system - thereby making a counselling service an easy thing to connect to.  It was imperative that the service was confidential, which again is impossible if students aren't able to self-refer.

What took me by surprise over the first few years though, was quite how many students who were visiting the counsellor for 'life coaching', seemed to come away with a mental health diagnosis.  In truth I felt that our counsellor must have been being over cautious, however, it quickly became apparent that this wasn't the case, when time after time the local GP's agreed with her diagnosis, and students were quickly given a 'care plan', be that medication or talking therapies.  Of course some of the talking therapy we were able to offer without long waiting lists, and as for the medication, our counsellor was able to give advice on the treatments, and indeed started to liaise with many of our local GP services in order to ensure that the students were on the best treatments straight away. It's easy to forget quite how little GP's know about Mental Health. We sort of think of them as 'all knowing', however, in reality, they probably spent just 6 months looking at Mental Illnesses during their training. So having an expert on the faculty enabled us to take various shortcuts, and more importantly enabled the students to get expert advice.

Initially, I felt that The MTA must have been incredibly unlucky to have quite so many students that were suffering from Mental Illnesses. I mean we're a tiny college (max of 44 students at any one time), whilst acknowledging that the students that we had were extremely lucky to have had a life-changing diagnosis.  Maladaptive coping mechanisms that were enabling them to have a productive life were suddenly being replaced with good health and the difference in every one of them was truly staggering.

However, such was the volume of previously undiagnosed illness I started to do some research and came across a survey from New Zealand. Rocked by an industry suicide they had undertaken a survey of the industry (backstage and onstage), and they had discovered that 1 in 3 of 'their industry' had an experience of personal mental illness as opposed to the recognised norm of 1 in 4.

That epiphany of it was an 'industry thing' was startling. Suddenly everything fell into place, we weren't the exception we were actually the norm. The big difference being that we had accidentally placed ourselves in a position to help people as opposed to simply brushing off symptoms. From that moment on it became a campaign to wake everybody else up - especially as more and more countries seemed to be making the link between our industry and mental health.

I've already blogged and vlogged about #time4change and the Mental Health Charter - but basically I felt like we needed to ring a really loud bell to tell other colleges (and indeed our industry as a whole) that something big was happening, and we all needed to respond to it.  In fact #time4change was the result of shouting about this for a number of years and everybody either ignoring me or telling me to shut up.

Going back to The MTA we just kept going - only now I truly understood that the work that we were doing was vital and potentially life-changing. 

We've always had 2 members of staff on call 24/7, 365 days a year, as we're aware that difficulties don't tend to be limited to the 8:30-5 college day. So our students, staff & graduates always have a mental health professional available to them.

So we have never changed what we've done, it's just in 2017 the government found a name for it - the 'whole school approach'.

We don't start working with our students until we know and understand them a bit. Take the premise of drama college - you go into classes with people asking you to be vulnerable BUT usually, those colleges/staff don't know a student's background - being vulnerable tends to open up a whole can of worms. So we try to find out if they're OK with being vulnerable first.

There's a misconception that this kind of approach is too 'kind', that we're creating a 'mollycoddled' cohort of students. Well, you couldn't be more wrong.  We have 0% unauthorised absence, we have 0% unauthorised lateness. For 99% of the year, we operate with 100% attendance (contagious sickness bugs are the only reason for approved absences). Students who are in the depth of a deep depression still come to college. . . because it's proven that getting up and at least attempting to do something will aid their recovery.   I would argue that we are building a true and honest resilience into each and every one of our students.

I've always held a belief that a large percentage of people go into our industry to escape, since opening The MTA I've added to that belief insomuch as I now believe that some people go into the industry to escape their own minds. I don't believe that the industry makes you ill, I believe that you were susceptible to illness (be that circumstances or genetic loading), and the industry with all of its 'be vulnerable to be great' teachings, have meant that those susceptibilities have been realised. Maybe if people had 'escaped' to a 9-5 office job those ticking time bombs would never have gone off? Who knows?

All of these discoveries were an accident, all created because the only counsellor that I could afford when I started was a certain Angie Peake. . . my wife! It's the most fortunate of accidents - and one that has transformed so many lives and continues to do so on a daily basis.

So there you have it - a whole school approach to mental health.