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

There's a herd of elephants in the room - and none of us are talking about them!

Once again the drama kicks off about 'poor people' AKA the working classes being given access to the arts, specifically training. A recent article in The Stage started yet another debate about the subject.  The hypothesis in the article was that however well meaning all the celebs were by speaking out about the 'crisis' they were, in fact helping to perpetuate the myth, therefore stopping the working classes giving it a go.

I have to say that this is 100% my experience. The amount of parents that contact me, telling me that they've researched training options and they've seen that so and so has said that it's too expensive.  It's only when they speak to me can we look at all the options available to them from the perspective of The MTA (obviously every college has their own criteria).  Now that said, I also once had a Principal of another college contact me, trying to convince me to take a student that we had turned down, and said at the end of the email that my other consideration should be that (and of course I'm paraphrasing here)  the family were loaded so I should take them anyway!!

I guess that last paragraph sums up the issue. There are colleges bending over backwards to facilitate students training with them, then there are 'businesses' just piling those fee paying students high and proud. The question is how do we ensure that talent is nurtured, as opposed to where do the pounds come from?

With the EU referendum looming, there is also the issue of colleges actively looking for overseas students. Now why is that do you think? Far be it for me to suggest that the financial premium that they're adding to these students has anything to do with the race to get some of them to train at UK establishments!  I'll quickly add that The MTA just charges everyone the same - it costs me the same to train them so I can't quite justify a price increase because they're moving countries to train!

The Stage article then, via FB comments, quickly shifted to the cost of just auditioning for drama colleges, and how that alone stops people applying.  Now this is definitely a subject to start jumping up and down about. Colleges are auditioning people in their thousands which clearly brings in a useful financial stream. How they can argue that they're losing money on a day when over 100 students are auditioning at one time I really don't know.

Each college has it's own system of auditioning, however I can't help thinking that it's not quite right to charge up to £80 to spend less than 30 mins in a room discussing a monologue? Or indeed if you're auditoning for a MT course why you couldn't at least have a stab at all 3 disciplines before they throw you out onto the pavement of despair.  I find it interesting hearing the stories of auditions, and how the students' experience of them defers from the website and indeed official line.

I think that the audition day charge SHOULD be capped. We charge £45, now that's for a full day (9 - 5...sometimes 6), we see them do all 3 disciplines, we give them written feedback at the end of the day, and make our decision that evening. They are then emailed the results, hopefully on the same evening (including the written feedback). They are auditioned by the entire senior faculty.  We've always given them a questionnaire to anonymously fill in at the end of the day, and one of the questions is 'do you feel like you've received value for money' and in 8 years 100% of them have said yes.  Quite a large percentage state that they feel like they should have paid more for the day! Our day has always run at a loss as we chose to audition in small numbers.

The problem here though are the elephants very clearly in the room ie we are training too many people for the industry, and more specifically some people are being trained purely because they can  pay (as demonstrated by the other college Principal). Colleges are increasing their intake, increasing their courses, and we are oversubscribed to the hilt. There are courses being run on something silly like 15 hours of contact time/week and their students think (and have been led to believe) that they're going to be 'industry ready' after that training.

Why are we seeing so many people coming through the door who have already trained? They've already paid £27,000 for their degree...and are now being forced to pay the same again to actually be trained for the industry that they wanted to be in?

Who is regulating this system? Can a university start any course it likes without someone actually checking the validity of the course?

Who is regulating the drama colleges? Drama UK aren't - they're busy in Asia last I heard, getting their 'brand awareness' up over there??

Everybody up in arms about stuff is sort of right....but in my humble opinion they're up in arms about the wrong stuff. There is a bigger picture here that's been well and truly lost.

Audition time - advice to parents

Some of you might remember this blog: http://www.thereviewshub.com/blog-annemarie-lewis-thomas-the-audition-problem/ a reflective blog looking at the annual audition 'problems'. If you didn't read it at the time, please do nip across now and have a little look.

As part of my job, and in an attempt to keep up with what's going on in the 'real world', (as us theatricals don't really nip out there enough really do we?) I've been researching drama school auditions and trying to find out what information there is out there for parents.
I know (for example), that when I went to college, my parents, having nothing to do with theatre, were really anxious about me making the 'right choice'.  Like most parents their idea of the 'right choice' proved to be very different from mine.  I found out not that long ago actually, that my father had been holding out for me to go down the Conservatoire route, even though that hadn't been on my radar for one second.  Back then there was a clear choice between a university and a thing called a Polytechnic. Now we don't have those two options anymore, as eventually all the Polys (as we used to call them), morphed into universities.  I think that back then, most people felt like the Poly was the poor man's university.  The thing that you got into if you couldn't get high grades(as they seemed to base their grade requirements on whether they wanted you or not. So I was getting offers of a couple of Es all because they thought that I'd fit in, whereas the universities were asking for Cs and Bs). Well certainly that was my family's take on the whole thing anyway.  So you can imagine the joy when a) having done the rounds of both universities and polys I way preferred the poly approach to teaching and b) I dared to say the immortal words of 'I want to go to this one'...to Middlesex....Polytechnic.  At that time their Performing Arts course was considered to be one of the best in the UK. To be called a BAPA (BA in Performing Arts) was actually quite an honour.  In fact to this day I consider it a major achievement that I was invited to be on that course.

As it turned out being a BAPA was perfect for me, the course suited me so well (all practical training with literally about one essay a term....if that).  They assessed me on doing shows.  I mean what more could I have asked for? Even their final exam paper was a 'seen question'..perfect for the practical musician who didn't really see the point of picking up a pen, when she could have been sat at the piano.

Even more interestingly I returned to the BAPA course just 3 months after graduating, this time as 'lecturer' (before you say it....I don't think that that was right either, but at the time, it certainly fed my ego to be invited back to teach on this amazing course, even though I had gained literally no experience since graduating with the exception of teaching on one children's Summer school project). Fast forward 4 years and I was teaching (lecturing) at a 'university' as Middlesex Polytechnic ceased to exist, and Middlesex University was born.  Not a thing had changed, I was still teaching the same things (I did have more experience by this point, and I had started to write modules for the course)....suddenly I was teaching in a place that my parents had wanted me to study.  In other words, it truly was all about 'a name'. Nothing about the reality of the situation.

It's the same with drama colleges really isn't it?  One day they were all offering diplomas, then seemingly overnight they were offering degrees.  All of a sudden 'informed parents' wanted their children to have a degree whilst studying to be a performer, as that seemed better than the old diploma.  I wonder how much the courses changed to accommodate that qualification? A few more essays? Definitely a whole load more paperwork for the teachers I bet, and why did it change? Well it's simple...funding.  A college offering a degree got more core funding than a college offering a diploma.  It was never about the training....it was all about the ££'s.  Just like when the polys became a university.  Nothing really changed, but the bank accounts looked healthier, and the staff looked a bit more stressed with the additional task of working their way through lots of red tape.

From what I can see the information for parents out there is as confusing as it always was.  They are forced onto various forums asking questions from the people that haven't actually any real knowledge, just a sense of camaraderie  from other parents (and students) that have already 'gone through the system'.  Sadly, from what I can see though, it's a bit like googling an illness.....you get told a whole lot of things that you really don't need/want to hear.

There's a whole issue here about why aren't some 6th form drama/dance teachers more informed.  I've certainly heard from a few in my time asking for information on our course, and our entry requirements etc, but compared to how many people are doing A Level Theatre studies/dance or BTEC it's really negligible.  So who the hell is actually informing people of the realities?

So here's some unbiased information for parents currently trying their best to work their way through the maze of the forums.  a) you really do not need a degree to be  a performer...it's the training that the course provides not the piece of paper at the end of it that will enable your child to have a career as a performer(they'd actually succeed with nothing....but seemingly nobody offers that). b) If you go down the degree route your child will receive more funding options e.g. Student Loans, etc. c) In a specialist subject e.g. dance, your child could still become a teacher later on in life without getting a degree now.  There are courses that they can go on later which will enable them to get onto a PG programme in teaching. Let your child work out what route suits them - be it a uni route or a vocational drama/dance school route. They are so different, and only your child will know what fits for them.  Check the contact hours of the uni/college. I think that that's the key to good training. Drama UK (which used to be the parent's Holy Grail of good drama school training with their 'accreditation' programme has slightly disintegrated, as major colleges e.g. RADA, LAMDA have stopped paying their extortionate fees), however they still represent what they consider to be the 'elite' insist that their colleges have a minimum of 30 hours contact time/week.  Check out what industry links the college/staff have? Ask to see their latest statistics - who cares if Sir Imanan Actor trained there 50 years ago....what are the stats for today? Be wary of soundbites. "6 students in the West End straight from college" sounds amazing, until you find out that their course trains 75 in a year? Find out what happened to the other 69 people that they didn't mention. Now it could very well be that all of them found representation, and all of them went straight into employment too...but ask the question. If the college is shouting about the fact that all of their students had found agent representation on graduating, just double check whether the college has an agency of their own...and how many of the 'all' are currently represented by them!

Our industry is notorious for a high drop out rate post graduating.  Find out what their percentages are? If you take the degree route you're going to have to pay £27,000+ for that piece of paper that you believe is so important.  That becomes a very expensive ornament if 6 months down the line your child decides that working in retail is more their thing (before you say it, the money or course wasn't completely wasted because your child 'found themselves' and the experiences offered to them over the 3 years will enhance their lives forever....but admit it, you'd be a little aggrieved).

It's all to do with gut instinct...it has to be.  If you're the parent pushing your child in one direction it's not going to work out.  Had my dad had his way, there is no doubt that I just would have failed, as I had no interest in the route that he considered to be the best for me.

The reality is that if your child wants to be a performer, nobody cares what qualification they've got. We all just care about what they can do.  As I always say, what's the difference between a diploma pirouette and a degree pirouette? When you go into that open dance call and they ask to see "the triple", do you think that they ask to see the piece of paper first to see where you studied? Then does it matter what class degree you got? Are you more likely to secure that film role because you got a first than the person behind you that got a third....but who is better suited to the role. . . . because they're shorter?

Insist on a degree because you think that they have more options later on in life, only to discover that they've been having 10 contact hours a week and have made no industry links at all...you'll soon find yourself looking at spending in excess of a further £15,000 as your child slowly realises that they need to do some sort of post grad course in order to actually get some industry links (let alone more consistent training).  Every year I'm horrified at the number of students that audition for The MTA's course, in their third year of college, or a year out after training at a uni.  Those poor parents are being forced to pay double whammy because they didn't know what questions to ask the first time around.

So I hope that this has helped you a bit. If you have a question....why not call me at The MTA, or any of the other colleges and ask us the questions? Hell call Drama UK (it might actually give them a purpose). Call Equity or Spotlight? Call any professional organisation!  After all it's in our interest to give you the facts, not the fiction of what you think our industry is currently demanding. Be wary of the internet oracle - find out who they are and what they're basing their knowledge on.  Being anonymous can afford some people more status than they perhaps deserve.

Don't forget at the end of the day you're not just another day older . . . you are also potentially £27,000 poorer.

Disclaimer: This of course is just all IMHO...but I really hope that it helps you out a little bit ;-)