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.

Time for a rethink

 As the Tory leadership battle continues this weekend saw both Truss and Sunak throwing the spotlight onto education. As with all their Tory-pleasing soundbites both had come up with what many people perceived to be radical ideas.

Now at the moment, I consider myself to be stranded in some political wasteland. Previously I considered myself a 'moderate' Labour supporter with a touch of Liberalism thrown in for good measure, yet more recently I, like many others, seem to be searching around for a party that truly does 'fit' with what I believe. The only thing that I'm 100% confident of is that I'm 0% Tory.  A party notoriously out for themselves, supporting the rich whilst so many in the UK go without just doesn't sit well with me at all - call me old-fashioned.  So nobody could be more surprised than me when I suddenly started to take a positive interest in what Truss and Sunak were saying over the weekend.

Truss went all in for nothing with plans to completely overhaul the education system in the UK, with the headline-grabbing soundbite of changing Higher Education's academic year. She suggested stopping the Summer rush of waiting for the exam results and then claiming places, and changing it to a "we know our results. . . give us a place" sort of system. 

The fact of the matter is that we've been stuck in an archaic educational system for decades. Sure it's been tweaked within an inch of its life over the years, out went O Levels, in came GCSEs, exams and continuous assessment scrape by together as unharmonious bedfellows, as we remain adamant that a 3-hour memory test is still the best way to ascertain who's academic. Of course, the result of the current system is a societal model that labels people as intelligent or not at 16 years. It places untold pressure on our teens to achieve success at a time that is already really hard - adolescence. The system doesn't take the "whole person" into consideration - so those teens battling illness, trauma, and basic demographic issues are issued an helpful label before they've had a chance to work out who they really are.

Then thanks to Tony Blair's vision of a world where 50% of young people went to university (university being perceived as the only successful route into the workplace), we're now left with the systemic issue of what about the rest? The role of vocational training has been diminished, with funding (or lack of) quickly following, apprenticeships are forever changing but never for the better, BTECs (once deemed for the academically less gifted) have decreased in real-world value. 

So I think that Truss is onto something with her 'shake it all up approach', except of course, as with every Truss soundbite, there appears to be no real substance or plan behind the headline.

Meanwhile, Sunak has gone for the easy target of limiting the degrees that don't lead to economic growth or to put it more bluntly, let's get rid of arts and the humanities. For some bizarre reason, the Tories love the idea of vandalising the arts in the UK, failing to fully recognise it seems that the arts are all around them, and if it wasn't for the arts their worlds would be much sadder. It's like they don't correlate that the opera, ballet, theatre, and the tv that they watch have all evolved from years of training, vocational training that is.

However, I do believe that Sunak is onto something too. Off the top of my head, I could name a number of universities that are currently offering performing arts degrees that are not fit for purpose. I can name the universities that went from offering one or two brilliant performing arts courses to offering a portfolio of performing arts courses. . . most of which were not and are not fit for purpose. It's the basic law of economics and supply and demand. Performing arts courses are hugely oversubscribed, predominantly because unlike more academic studies you can't keep cramming students into a lecture theatre, so the courses are restricted by the numbers that they can teach at one time. So the demand is huge but the opportunities are small. Step forward opportunistic universities looking to create other revenue streams.

In theory, this is great right? More courses = more opportunities, however in reality this does not play out. We're seeing courses that are claiming to get people industry-ready offering ridiculous contact hours of just 12-16 week. Absolutely impossible to build up a skillset within that timeframe. So the courses focus on private study or peer devised modules, so the students "think" that they're training, but in reality, they're simply mucking about with their friends.

On some of these courses, the staff are woefully unqualified to teach their subject, yet they're attempting to teach the next generation how to enter an industry that they have no first-hand knowledge of. I mean it's bonkers, yet they're all still oversubscribed. Such is the legacy and myth around a university education, parents would rather their children go to study at an ill-equipped university than wait for a place at a college that can truly deliver the goods because they believe that the very mention of the "degree" will get their child a job.

As I note every single time, a university can knock out a quick box-ticking degree course in no time at all, that course, regardless of how inadequate it is, will automatically be eligible for a government funding stream. Sunak is right to want to audit some of those courses. I would like to think that the money that they'd save on the "not fit for purpose" courses would be instantly rerouted into all the amazing courses out there that truly deliver results. I'd also love to think that Sunak would expand his thinking and actually place some value on vocational training - however, I realise that this would truly be the Christmas miracle that we've been waiting years for.

Whoever wins the leadership race there is so much work to do in education, and I guess the only thing that we can all be sure of - is that neither of them will put in that work

As always the comments are open and I'd love to hear what you think

What happened to the Money Tree?

 The Stage have been covering the news of ALRA's sudden closure this week, and they've even attempted to address the issue of vocational training under threat, in a great article by Georgia Snow which I was grateful to have been invited to add a comment to.

However in the article what isn't explicitly named is how the vocational training 'establishment' chased what they believed to be the golden goose of funding, and in doing so sold our industry down the river without a paddle.  Let me explain.

You categorically do not need a degree per se to be a performer. For sure you need a skill set, and techniques to enhance your talent, but you don't 'need' the piece of paper. A casting breakdown will discuss a look, a skill set, and possibly mention that the person needs to have undergone training - it will never mention a qualification. In fact, the introduction of formal HE qualifications is a relatively recent thing eg Birds introduced the first dance degree in 1997 - just 25 years ago. Of course, it wasn't that long before every established college was offering degrees - and why? Well, it's actually quite simple - they thought that a degree would open up a pot of money which would attract more students. A degree guarantees the college between £6K-£10K per person. Now back in the 1990s that must have sounded idyllic.  What a way to 'open up access' and get funding to all. . . including the colleges' bank balance too.

Of course, this is also when things took a nasty turn - because the colleges & universities that validated these degrees (as very few colleges actually have the right to issue their own degrees) also saw the golden goose, and also wanted in on these highly desirable courses. These courses were for many, a pathway to "the dream". So universities also started to advertise "industry-ready" courses. Some of them on realising quite how much demand there was to be a performer starting adding courses all over the place. They'd have their "jewel-in-the-crown" course, but they also had some mop-up courses too (hello foundation courses and a whole range of Post Graduate courses). 

The difficulty though was obvious quite soon - degrees are like the ASDA world of training, pile 'em high and sell them low. Cram 200 students into a lecture theatre, pop one lecturer in front, introduce the idea of private study and Bob's your uncle, it's a course running on a healthy profit, throw in long holidays, an occasional reading week/half term and sit back and watch your profits grow.

So this it where it's gone wrong, as training to be a performer just doesn't work like that. You need small classes as you need to work on the individuals - you can't 'batch teach'. You also need a lot of contact hours, as there's just too much to cover if you want to do it right. Then add in the fact that you really need to be doing a show or two (and they're not cheap to produce) and suddenly those figures don't look so healthy. So what happened? They all started to take more students to increase the income, forgetting that with more students you needed more studios, more teachers, more productions, we started to see things double/triple cast. . . yet nobody said a word. They were applauded for getting bigger! Their size became synonymous with their success, whereas in reality they were slowly selling out.

The universities didn't even play the game from the outset, they made sure that the figures added up, so simply cut the number of contact hours. There are currently courses that only do 16 contact hours/week with cohorts ranging from 30 - 60, they don't do any shows - but they're still claiming to get people industry-ready. Step forward the 'mop-up' Post Grad programmes at the drama colleges ready to take more money to provide what their undergraduate course should have - but couldn't afford to.

The vocational colleges slowly faded out the diploma courses or at least merged them enough with the degrees so that nobody noticed, as their business models became volume over quality. Elite courses that were once the very best of the UK vocational dance/drama scene became ALDI, loads of stock, loss leaders helping to support the creme de la creme (if you have over 100/year and run several courses it's relatively simple to have enough good news stories to cover up the fact that a large majority of your graduates haven't done as well as you'd hope, add in decades of history and alumni that can keep that PR flame burning and those loss leaders will still fight to get into your college).

Now add into the mix the fact that the government haven't increased the fee structure for a number of years, yet all of the costs have increased, and some 25 years later after they all found the "Money Tree" not only has it stopped delivering - it's now asking for money back. To train a performer effectively costs around £14K - £16k/year (depending on what other courses you have running, and what facilities you have free access to) - so suddenly that £6k-£10k golden goose has turned into a headless chicken flapping around looking for more revenue.

Lots of them found additional revenue from fleecing overseas students. There's never been an explanation as to why they felt it was OK to charge overseas students thousands of pounds more than UK residents, other than of course, it was still deemed to be a bargain compared to courses in their own countries. So it was the supply of the market I guess. However, Brexit meant that a huge chunk of that additional revenue dried up, as a surprisingly large percentage of vocational colleges are not permitted to sponsor a student visa. In other words - the "Money Tree" has well and truly been felled.

Here's the really sh*t bit though. When they chased the "goose" (apologies for using two metaphors), they left behind the true vocational training. They didn't fight one iota when the government stopped the PCDL - the only loan available for vocational training in the UK. They didn't fight because they weren't affected. The colleges within the FDS had long forgotten their roots - more than that they'd drawn up the drawbridge from the start to ensure that they were safe. They didn't care about the training industry - they cared about themselves. Those self-appointed elite colleges abandoned vocational training and opted for self-preservation. When people started to question their teaching methods they looked the other way. As investigation after investigation started over (now) proven racism and abuse they have said nothing! They protected their own - when they should have been protecting their students. 

So here we are - the goose is cooked, the Money Tree has been felled, and those of us that stuck to the belief that training was about talent, nurturing, and individuality are all on the outside deemed to be collateral damage. Yet this week that damage happened to one of their own and ALRA folded.

Equity suddenly got involved - but they have done absolutely nothing to help to protect vocational training in the UK.  In fact more than that, they perpetuate the myth of 'you need a degree to become an actor by only accepting colleges that do a recognised diploma/degree onto their graduate programme and let's be clear - they do absolutely nothing to regulate the training industry, they do nothing to hold the colleges to account. 

We will lose other colleges - bring on some more articles in The Stage discussing why, bring on more voices of shock from within the industry - but it all happened when you all watched from the sidelines.

Just this month another brilliant vocational college was sold off to a uni, in the past few years another couple of brilliant colleges were sold off to a conglomerate. You can keep celebrating the buildings - but the people inside those buildings the staff and the students are now just numbers on the database, and numbers on some accountant's spreadsheet, and when those numbers don't add up - more doors will be forced to close.

Freelancers in drama colleges

 The majority of dance and drama colleges will nowadays be hiring freelancers. My own college, The MTA, was built on a business model of almost exclusively using freelancers - as it just made more sense. I didn't need the same skill set every week of the term, so why would I put people on a salary and tie them into a contract with us? We have a handful of staff on the payroll (and by that I mean. . . 3), but everybody else is freelance.

It enables me to have a dynamic faculty of top industry professionals who come and go as their professional work allows (and before you start. . . we have lots of things in place to ensure that our students get consistency throughout the course. . . so don't be worrying about that right now, and don't be worrying about them not being good teachers either, if you look hard enough you can find top professionals that are brilliant teachers too) By having a faculty of professionals I can ensure that all lessons are current, and nobody within the staff group has become entrenched in academia. They all remember what it's like to be doing it. They all know what the industry needs today. I have nobody on my faculty that feel a bitterness about the industry. They all love it and have chosen to 'give back' as their in-between job.

Most colleges will constantly be hiring guest creatives to come into work on their productions, many like us will be hiring both creative and technical help. 

Colleges, like our industry, are built on a foundation of freelancers.

Up until 2009 when I opened the college I too was on the freelance treadmill, attempting to cobble together job after job that would allow me to pay my bills and survive.  I am not from a monied background so I would often be living hand to mouth. Maybe it was me and my poor budgeting skills but with no savings to fall back on I really needed every invoice paid on time in order to keep afloat. I have such vivid memories of invoices not being paid on time and me having to juggle my commitments in order to ensure that I could cope until whoever paid me what they owed. 

I remember the stress of checking my account to see what I could afford to do, the annoyance of knowing that I had done a job but somebody else was sitting on my fee. The sense of shame when you sent that email asking them if they'd received your invoice (knowing full well that they had, but you just wanted to prompt them to pay), the feeling of begging when you had to keep writing emails because people had held onto your hard-earned money that bit too long. When you don't have a backup, you remember those feelings.

So when I opened The MTA I made a promise to myself that nobody that worked for me would ever have to wait for their fee. I would always pay them on receipt of their invoice. It felt like such an obvious thing. The students would have paid their fees - that money was not mine, it belonged to the people that were working with the students, so why would I hold onto it? Some 14 years later and I still pay people on receipt of their invoice.

I believe that all colleges should do this. Now the argument will be that it's OK for me, I'm a tiny college, those invoices won't be flooding in, it's easy to manage. . . yadda, yadda. Here's the rub though - if the college is bigger they'll have a finance department whose sole job is to manage invoices, pay people and balance the books. With online banking this process is relatively easy. It's not undoable . . . it's just that none of them have ever done it, but why wait for 'payroll'? Be the change that this industry needs. We the employers need to put ourselves out to help the people that enable us to run our businesses. 

We don't pay the best. We don't offer our freelancers that much work every term, however, I have the most insanely loyal group of people working for me that have literally stuck with me through the good times and the tough, and I believe that I've secured that loyalty by understanding how the freelancer works because we're all in the same industry.

As soon as colleges get taken over by corporations and academic institutions they're lost, as those people have no concept of what it's like to go from job to job, earning a bit here and a bit there. They come from a place of security. . . but our industry has never gifted us that privilege.

How long before drama colleges are extinct?

 2 years ago I wrote this blog about how the education system was killing vocational training. Then last year I expanded on this even further in this article this was a matter of weeks before announcing that my own college was going to be a casualty of the underfunding of vocational courses.  Now by some miracle, we survived (thanks to a huge surge of industry support and some very generous benefactors), but the issue of funding loomed ever larger today when ALRA announced that it was closing.  Obviously, I felt a sense of deja vu.

Firstly my heart goes out to the students, staff, and graduates of ALRA. Losing your 'safe place' and your 'college' is disorientating, to say the least. I remember telling our lot so vividly. It ranks up there as one of the worse days of my life BUT we did ensure that all of our staff were paid, our freelancers had been given lots of notice to look for other work, and our students (like ALRA's actually) were all guaranteed a place to continue their training together, the big difference was that our students were TOLD this information in person by myself and the Board. We were there for the hard part. We owed it to our students to tell them in person and to help them to find some satisfactory closure to the whole sorry episode. They could contemplate the news in 'their' building. We remained present online. We didn't run away - we confronted the ugly head-on. 

I don't know what happened at ALRA but it's wrong that freelancers are left with monies owing, and it's wrong that some staff found out on social media. It's wrong that their students were told this information in an email when they weren't even on-site. That's a shitty way to treat your community. Even if they had been locked out of their building - call the students to a "town hall" meeting in a park or something, you can't just vanish.

ALRA is the 2nd drama college of the supposedly elite Federation of Drama Schools to suddenly close. Such an 'elite' organisation that they still haven't updated their website to note that Drama Centre London closed 2 years ago. 

The Federation plays off the fact that they all USED to be 'accredited' colleges, in fact, lots of people still use the term, but actually no course is accredited anymore, that ended with Drama UK - the parent organisation of the Feds.  In fact other than lauding themselves as the elite there is very little to celebrate within their tight-knit little group these days.  How many of their gang got called out for institutional racism back in 2020? How many of the 'gang' have got ongoing investigations around abuse? Some investigations have already concluded and have been found to be guilty. What has the Federation done about it? Absolutely nothing. 

As colleges fold they do nothing to help the students, the safety net comes out from the world of social media where everybody tries to help everybody else. It's a nice by-product of the industry - empathy.

The Federation say that their mission statement is this: 

"To engage in activities, projects and discussions collectively and individually that enable diverse groups of people to receive excellent training for the contemporary profession in all its aspects.

To work with other schools with shared vision, values and approaches in the training to share current best practice and identify opportunities for change and enhancement in the future.

To work with the industry and professional stakeholders to ensure that the training experiences provided allow graduates to enter and sustain professional careers with a current, adaptable and expert skillset.

To be an identified presence in public discussion of both the challenges and values of conservatoire training."

It seems to me that they've done none of this. It's a group of old boys navel-gazing and missing the big picture. It's not even myopic, it's blind!

Vocational training is so hard to fund as it's expensive. You can't sit 100 people in a lecture theatre and pay for one person to teach them all, you need to work in smaller groups, with a lot of contact hours to cover all the relevant work. Small groups, and high contact hours are very expensive. 

Most colleges sold out years ago when they went down the degree route. I've shouted about this for years but they were all too busy staring at what they thought was the golden goose, however, their myopic vision failed to see the Trojan horse. Validating universities are big business, they want value for money and our training courses just don't provide that.

I spent months exploring this option but failed to see how it could be financially viable to ethically train a group of performers with the financial restrictions of a degree. Something had to give, and actually, a lot of colleges have been 'giving' a lot. A reduction in contact hours, an additional charge, additional students to make up the deficit (which actually only increases the debt in the end as you need more studios to house them. .  which means that you end up trying to get more students to fill the half-full studios, and so it continues).

The books don't balance at degree level - that's the takeaway. I fear that ALRA might be a victim of that simple equation.

ALRA won't be the last college to close, we'll see courses closing or reducing in numbers (be that student numbers to reduce the loss, or contact hours to reduce the spending), we'll see independent colleges selling up and joining large universities or large conglomerate organisations.

UK drama training used to be elite - now at best it's functional, because the people that cared, the professionals, are no longer running the show. The accountants took over and the big boys aka the Federation welcomed them in with open arms because they never looked outside of themselves.

Shame on them, and shame on the organisations that have pandered to them (and yes, Equity and Spotlight I'm looking at you again on this).

The biggest shame of all today though is on our industry as we've seen yet again how the 'person' has been lost in the commercial. An increasing pattern of behaviour that does nothing to encourage people to stay in the industry.

The old-school camaraderie is still around though - social media demonstrates that when we hit a crisis. It's just a shame that this lasts for the briefest of moments before the next crisis hits.

We need an urgent review of vocational training in the UK. We need to share good practice. We need to accept that the death knell is tolling for all independent colleges unless something drastic changes. We need to value vocational training, not sell it to the highest bidder for a bigger studio and a branded theatre.