A Time For Reflection

 It's been over a week now since The MTA announced that it was closing in Sept 2022. That's a week of everybody including me attempting to process the news.

Having bizarrely gone through this week last year too I'm struck by how different it is this time. Maybe of course because last year as soon as we announced it some hope materialised within days, so it never really felt real at all.  

Last time we knew that this was coming. We'd had months recognising that the problem was real, with weeks passing before people applied to join us. It was inevitable that the closure announcement was going to come.

This year the hope came before the announcement, which somehow made this feel all the worse. You see even though we'd lost a benefactor there was always the hope of the Trinity validation pulling through for us, after all, as I've written about a fair few times now, the evidence from the day of the assessment and subsequent assessors coming to see our shows was overwhelmingly positive.  Literally, hours chatting to the main assessor both on the day of the pre-validation assessment and even before had clearly raised no red flags at all (and trust me when I say that I'm always on the lookout for red flags). The assessor (John Gardyne) clearly understood what he was talking about, and was hugely diligent in his dealings with us. 

We always knew that we needed 3 things to survive beyond this year, and we knew that we could have survived with 2 of the 3 things in place, we didn't need the full house. The 3 things were simple, additional funding, the cohort size returning to pre-pandemic levels and the all-important validation from Trinity. Now 1 and 2 and intrinsically linked - which John completely understood. If there were no major issues on our course and we were able to whiz through the validation process, for the first time since 2018 we would have been in a position to offer assistance with fees.

For background from 2011 - 2018 we were able to offer students help via a government back Professional Career Development Loan - the PCDL. Whilst not massive - just £10K/student, we saw our applications increase once we were in a position to offer that help. Interestingly the criteria for that loan was determined by a government office all based on paperwork and stats, ensuring that we weren't some rogue organisation.

I had attempted to shout loudly when the PCDL was suddenly pulled with no warning, and have subsequently continued to scream into the abyss like some harbinger of doom with vocational training's death knell ringing loudly into my own echo chamber, but nobody listened. They all just turned away because it didn't impact them. We were after all an outlier of a college so we were hugely insignificant. Our problems were exactly that. . . "our" problems.

Anyway, back to 'now' and our situation, suddenly being able to apply for a validation that could access the Advanced Learner Loan, a loan worth £22k/student for us, was clearly going to be a game changer. Even taking into account the current cost of living crisis, the increased competition within the training market, the number of phone calls and conversations on lives on various platforms was proof if proof was needed that having an ALL attached to the funding options for the course was going to completely put us back on track. We 100% had to get through another year with a teeny tiny cohort which was always going to be a challenge BUT there were ways and means around that. Our business plan was going to look hugely different with that student funding stream secured, meaning that we could have looked to the bank to help us through the 2022-23 academic year. My wife and I were still down as guarantors for loans taken out by the college, and we had already discussed the possibility of guaranteeing a loan to get us through the next year. There was no way that we'd do it without the validation in place though as we had already loaned the business a lot of money back in 2015 to facilitate the move to our new premises and that money was still in the college, so we would have had to be really sure of success before committing even more finance.

So with all of these "knowns" in place, we had hope in abundance. For sure with each passing week that Trinity failed to send us the report that hope waivered. We needed to move onto the full validation assessment with a real urgency in order to secure it and advertise the fact that our training came with some form of student funding. 

When the report landed in July a few days after having made a formal complaint to Trinity about the 4 months of delay, it was devastating to discover that the report that was presented to us bore no relationship to the report that was verbally discussed with me back in March. In fact, I barely recognised the college within that report.  Over the past week, we've released that report to our students & graduates (as I've always believed in completely transparency), and they are equally bemused by what they've read. 

You see #theMTAway truly is unique, and unless you've taught at the college or been a student there or, like John, spent hours trying to understand how it worked, you just couldn't blag a report on it. Well. . . I say you couldn't, somebody at Trinity has clearly given it a bloody good go.

So this year's closure does feel vastly different - but predominantly because this year's closure is unfair, and whilst we all come to terms with that, the fact that a major organisation such as Trinity has not only failed to own up to their part in our demise, but rather lie even further in the most ridiculous of press releases that salt is being rubbed rather harshly into the wounds. 

They have just 9 more days to present the findings of their external arbiter, plus 9 days to present the full report - complete with our 6 pages of corrections. I'll say it again though - a report on our training cannot be blagged, it's a unique 2-year training programme so unless they've found the original report or at least spoken to our original assessor this is all going to get very messy. THAT'S why this year feels so different - we're definitely closing, but the post-mortem into why we've been forced to close is going to drag on for months, and eventually, I know that we're going to be vindicated, at which point that hope will turn to despair at all that we might have been and all that we've lost. The loss of a truly unique college amongst the homogeny of training available, the loss of free training & rehearsal space for our graduates, the loss of a creative hub for new writing, and that's before you even start to count up the financial cost of it all that, wages, redundancy monies, lease, deposits, damn it. . . even our loan.

We're over. . . but we're not

Defining Gaslighting

My mum, a staunch unionist, always taught me about social responsibility. She would always call out injustice wherever she saw it. She inspired me to do the same.  This ongoing discussion will not help the college, but if it holds an organisation to account then it's a really important conversation to have. I can't turn a blind eye to this (I mean I seriously wish that I could). . . the cost to our industry is too high.

Over the past couple of years lots of people's eyes have been opened to the fact that certain people in the public eye are culpable of gaslighting. I did a poll the other day on twitter asking people if they felt that gaslighting had increased since we've had a PM that literally does nothing else.  A stark percentage believed that his lack of integrity had trickled down through the cracks of society.

For those that aren't sure what gaslighting means, to gaslight is to make people question their own reality. So when Johnson says one thing and then denies it in the next interview, we're all left wondering if we'd imagined the first statement.

In my first blog about all of the Trinity debacle I was clear that I felt that their response to our initial complaint was rather. . . well. . . gaslit. They actually didn't address any of our concerns at all, simply telling me that the report was the report and we just had to suck it up really. To be clear they didn't write those exact words. . . but that was definitely my takeaway. 

I find gaslighting fascinating - take even their initial response, all of my senior faculty had read that report, and we all had input on the corrections, we had all come to the same conclusion that our main assessor's input was missing, yet when faced with a corporate response taking zero accountability, you instinctively have to take a step back and question your own reality. The massive difference here though is that my faculty, the students. . . a LOT of people had heard the same things at the same time. This wasn't one person's word against another. 

Anyway - today they've issued a statement designed to shut down the unofficial social media campaign that would have the potential to damage their reputation. . . and they've disappointingly gone for gaslighting one more time.

So let's just deal with facts shall we . . . here goes

1) Trinity failing to process our pre-validation assessment within a reasonable time frame did massively contribute to our closing. We've been clear all along that they weren't solely responsible. It's no secret that we had announced last year that we were closing. . .so clearly our position was always precarious this year. Suddenly having access to the potential of student funding though was a game changer for us and would have allowed us to be sustainable and indeed viable for the foreseeable future. So both of those facts can just sit side by side comfortably.

2) Even in their statement they've got their facts wrong. . . the company that has named itself as a regulated awarding organisation are now stating that they only watched one in person show. They came to 2. . . maybe it was just a typo eh, but you'd expect a bit more rigour in a statement defending their integrity*

*UPDATED to add that they've now issued a correction notice about this, but when I say a correction notice, it's actually not, they just now say that they watched 2 shows, they've just tried to make it all casual and normal.

2) They say that their work is scrutinised, they spend a long time telling us about their great reputation. It was a 9 page report and we had 6 pages of corrections. Make your own conclusion.

3) We would have been OK with the decision to pause the validation process IF that decision was based on facts taken from the main assessor. The report focussed on dance, it didn't mention our singing or acting at all, other than in the show report for Hair, which states that we had "demonstrated standards of singing, acting and dance required by the diploma"

4) They state that our report had been 'unavoidably delayed' - which is true as I had received our original recommendations back in March, yet the report (with different recommendations) was presented in July.

5) They state that they're working within the "published guidelines". Firstly I'd love to see those as we haven't been able to find them anywhere, but also every college is so different. eg they might have made a recommendation that we had a new building, in which case it would have taken us years to be validated, so validation is a piece of string issue. The difference here is that we were TOLD by the assessors on the day that we could be optimistic to be validated by July. Our main assessor had worked for Trinity for 17 years as their main assessor, he wasn't some rookie prone to error. In my meeting with them, they chastised this assessor for speaking out of turn, noting it as a point of learning. You conclude whatever you like, as we are not able to contact our main assessor. He's not able to speak to us. We did reach out to him, only to be told that he no longer worked for the organisation and therefore couldn't comment. 

6) They've refuted in the "strongest terms possible" our claims about them falsifying parts of that report. Who would be so dumb to suggest that without tangible proof? Not us, though interesting that they've now popped out in the public domain that they've watched a "sample" of online shows. 

7) Finally this statement "Further, we wish to make clear that we will not tolerate any personal attacks being made against Trinity’s staff and assessors and any questioning of their integrity in their professional work." Now that's very clever isn't it? That leads the reader by the hand inferring that personal threats have been made to assessors. To my knowledge, not one threat has been made to anybody.  More than that I'd be mortified if it had - that's not the way to hold an organisation up for accountability. A social media shout-out requesting accountability is not threatening behaviour.  Let me go further - I DO question the integrity of the person that wrote the report that we received, and I DO question the integrity of an organisation attempting to gaslight their way out of an issue. I DO NOT question the integrity of John Gardyne, our main assessor, we don't question the integrity of Catherine Dulin who came to assess Hair and took time to speak to us after the performance, and we DON'T question the integrity of Brenda Barratt-Glassman who was our second assessor. I DO find it a shame though THEY weren't so loyal to their assessors in a zoom meeting when they mentioned that one of them hadn't been able to understand a system that we were trialling at Trinity's request.  Note how I would NEVER sell one of those brilliant assessors down the Swanee. In fact - it strikes me that we're standing up for the integrity of the assessors by wanting to see the original report. We believe that report to have been an accurate representation of our course.

To conclude, we are also a charity. . . but I'll save you the gaslighting PR job, as I'd rather just deal with facts.

The "Holey" Trinity

I'm aware that I'm posting a lot about Trinity. I'm aware that it could be perceived to be sour grapes, or bitterness even that something just didn't go the way that I would have liked to. Here's the thing though, only ONE validating organisation holds the strings to DaDa awards. When the government took away the PCDL in 2019 they replaced it with the Advanced Learner Loan, and once again in our vocational training industry the only courses approved for the ALL is. . you guessed it, the Trinity Diploma.

So to summarise, if you choose to train in a vocational college, one that has not gone the degree route to funding, literally the only pathway to student funding is via the Trinity Diploma. So Trinity College London, a registered charity worth millions is the main gatekeeper to literally thousands of pounds worth of student funding. The ALL alone is worth £22k/Student. 

Little wonder then that my little college with its unique 2 year accelerated learning programme was elated when they caught up with the modern world and agreed to validate accelerated learning courses such as ours. Suddenly we had the POTENTIAL for our students to receive funding. 

Now if you've read my last blog you'll know that our pre-validation assessment process went massively array after the pre-validation assessment visit had happened, indeed even after I'd been in the zoom with our main assessor talking through our recommendations. Now I should state for the record, our main assessor had worked at Trinity for 17 years, indeed he had been a team leader for them, so not an underling learning the ropes on our assessment. This was someone that was an essential cog in their validating machine. Over the past few years, I'd had several conversations with him and he really knew his stuff. 

This assessor - actually he deserves more than anonymity, this assessor called John Gardyne really took time to understand our unique little course. He asked pertinent questions, and he took an interest in the staff, students and the course. When observing classes he was clearly engaged. When informally discussing his findings with us at the end of the visit he was clearly enthused. He had completely won us all over.

We were genuinely worried and upset when we kept receiving his out-of-office reply saying that he was on medical leave. In fact, I even wrote to him a few times whilst chasing the bloody report to say that I just hoped that he was OK. 

So when I had to sit in a zoom with 2 people that had never visited the college, and I heard one of them in particular clearly gaslighting me - starting the zoom with "if you want my advice you shouldn't bother going for validation" I KNEW in that instant that John's original report was not included in the work of fiction that they presented to us even though they had stated that it was (cue the dramatic music)

Let me give examples:

The report stated that (and forgive me for not directly quoting, but you'll get the picture in a moment) that our timetable was busy with no private study time (let's not forget here that private study time is actually a money-saving device used by colleges), and our students must be tired and potentially prone to more injuries. Swiftly followed by their account of chatting with our students where the assessors asked them if they were tired and our students said . . . no. The recommendation? We should undertake a year's study to find out if our students were tired. and more prone to injuries.  We've been running for 14 years with no major injuries. We have an amazing physio within the faculty that is fiercely proactive in injury prevention. The nature of our course means that in reality, our students are less likely to be injured. . scientific fact. They had also noted in their report that our students had felt heard, so why the hell were they asking us to waste time on this study? Our students meet with all 4 of the senior faculty at the end of every term for 1:1 tutorials, they speak to staff all the time AND we undertook anonymous surveys twice a year in case students wanted to let us know something that they weren't comfortable with telling us face to face.  We hold regular debriefing discussions after every production. Name me another college that spoke and listened to its students as much.

Or how about this:

They noted that the course was different, and not everybody was suited to an accelerated learning programme (like no sh*t Sherlock), so they recommended that we spent a year looking at our audition process to check that we're taking in the right people!! We've been running for 14 years, in the same report they'd correctly noted that we had the amazingly low dropout rate of just 3%, whilst they incorrectly stated that a "high percentage of students had secured agent recommendation". I say incorrectly as literally every single one of them had secured representation. I'd say that the evidence was actually already in their report, why did we need to look at anything??

Those are just 2 examples of many. From stating that we held Q&As with our graduates (which literally has never happened other than Ambassador Afternoon which is an informal sharing). . . have you seen the amazing people that come to work with our students? No disrespect to our ambassadors but our guest list includes people like Imelda Staunton, Stephanie J Block, Mike Jibson, Alison Steadman, Hadley Fraser, David Eldridge, Mike Leigh, Jenna Russell, Rosie Craig, so a host of other inaccuracies the report that we received was not of our course.

They spoke about our original film musical J - a film that won countless film festival awards - a contemporary retelling of the Don Juan story set in a non-binary world, but claimed that it was a story about a degenerative pop star? Now I'm not kidding when I say that I haven't a clue where they picked that storyline up from - as I was one of the writers of the film and there is NO mention of a pop star lifestyle at all.

If this wasn't so tragic it would be bloody hilarious as this faux report instantly blocked off all access to student funding. We can prove that they lied about watching other shows online - yet their lies have cost us our last lifeline.

I am 100% confident that they didn't have John's report - a report that I had already been talked through.

I am 100% confident that they cobbled together the report when we eventually complained that the process had taken 4 months longer than we had originally been told.

I am 100% confident that their first response to our complaint was to gaslight us into submission

I am 100% confident that we will be vindicated. . . .but that it's too late to save The MTA

But that should not stop us from fighting to make Trinity accountable. They've mistreated us, and my hunch is that they mistreated John too - and I'm happy to fight for the truth