The Right To Reply

All I wanted to do was to run a small drama college, when things went tits up last year I took time to process it all and then just move on, and in truth whilst I've found this year's closure announcement harder, it's only because of the way that it's come about. Now, simply by standing up for the college, the course, the staff and the students, I've unwittingly found myself embroiled in some ridiculous battle for the truth.  

This week I was accused of embarking on a social media campaign against Trinity, with Trinity emailing me with an ultimatum of removing my blogs, publishing this letter, or run the risk of them setting their lawyers on me.  Now as regular readers will know for the past 7 years I've used this blog account in an attempt to raise awareness of certain issues, a place where my voice can be heard unedited, after all, I am only ever writing my truth. So given the ultimatum and the contents of the letter, I was delighted to share it, even though it was worded to raise questions about the validity of our concerns.

In their letter they once again attempted to address our complaints. I mean I have some observations about some of their statements. Let's start at the beginning - by noting that we had a well-publicised campaign to fundraise back in 2021 in order to stay open, they're sowing the seeds of doubt as to whether or not we were financially viable.  This is because we've been very clear that two things would have saved us - one being the validation, and the other a private benefactor. Both together would have been exquisite, but having just one of them would have potentially saved us. 

Moving further down I'm curious about this sentence when discussing our main assessor how he'd "reflected the view of his colleague that the performance which she attended in early March was strong in material and acting, but the dance numbers were basic and overall the work seen did not fully demonstrate appropriate Level 6 standards." I'm a massive fan of John Gardyne our main assessor. I could talk for hours about the conversations that we had which bore no relationship to what they're claiming were his private concerns, but of course that would come down to my word against theirs (or indeed for some of those statements, our word against theirs, as both students and staff heard a very different version), so I won't bother going into it all again, however I'm really curious about how John came to the same conclusions that the other assessor allegedly came to over the show, as he hadn't seen it. Only one assessor came to watch SOSN and that was Brenda Garrett-Glassman. 

In this situation I'm always curious about what people don't say eg in their response, you'll note that they failed to mention that the assessor on our final show clearly named that all of our students did meet the right level in all 3 disciplines? Anyway, I'm sure that they just wanted to keep their statement brief? I mean they also agreed that the short film that they did watch met the standard too, even though it was cast with 1st years. So in August the students met the criteria, in January when they were with us they did, somehow it went wrong in March, but got back on track in June? How odd.

The letter did for the first time say that our main assessor "withdrew" from our assessment, so you guys found that out at the same time as us. Lucky you!  As far as we were concerned until that statement was sent John went off sick with covid sometime around 25th March and never returned.  When we chased the report we were told that we'd have to wait for his return, so really interesting to now hear that he withdrew from it all. Of course, we've tried to track John down, after all, he was the person that we'd dealt with, unfortunately, when we contacted him he told us that he'd left Trinity and therefore couldn't speak to us. 

I think that the wording of the statement was interesting eg when discussing watching online performances which is one of the areas that we think is contentious they said this: "Trinity has never represented that it watched in entirety the hundreds of hours of recordings that you submitted." See that's really interesting to me as that makes me sound a bit mad doesn't it? Like I've been sending them hours of recordings? Why on earth would I have been doing that? In reality, John asked me to send all of our archive performances from Dec 2020 - just 7 shows in total. They literally received the shows that they requested, so not hours at all. In fact, John had been monitoring our shows since June 2020 and had already watched some of our online work prior to the 2021 stuff, as he wanted to be sure that our work was meeting the correct standard before agreeing that we should apply when the criteria changed.

I find it interesting that they attempt to discredit me again when they write about me not understanding the validation process. It's like they hadn't received a handover of the 90 mins conversation that John, Brenda and myself had when they were giving me their original recommendations in a zoom, as if they had there was no way that they could have made that statement after all that zoom discussion wasn't an informal chat, it was part of our formal assessment procedure, they were literally giving me their report recommendations? 

Similarly, their stuff around funding is somewhat muddied, for sure the EFSA allocate the DaDAs but you must be offering a Trinity Level 6 Diploma in order to be considered. As for "other ways for in which your students can access ALAs" (I think that they meant ALL) well at Level 6 there isn't, and our course operated at Level 6. What I find fascinating is how all the assessors that we dealt with had such pride in the Trinity Diploma, all of them were pleased that we had elected to take this route to student funding as opposed to a degree route, yet here it's like Trinity themselves don't understand the value of their course?

To add a bit of authority to their response they make out that they're regulated by OfQual - but fail to point out that OfQual's regulations don't apply until you've been validated. At the point of entry they're not regulated by anybody.

Anyway - their letter (I'm mindful to keep sharing it, as I want all of you to read exactly what they're saying) was clearly designed to scare me, the threat of the lawyer and all that. Of course, you can't involve lawyers if the person making the statements that you feel are harmful to your organisation are true. I mean you can. . . but you really run the risk of being exposed. I would be bloody stupid to be fighting this report if I wasn't sure of my facts. For me, the reputation of my college, students and staff is every bit as valuable as the reputation of a global organisation such as Trinity. The MTA is closing in 2 weeks and I'd like the final word to be the report that John had written, not a report cobbled together with huge inaccuracies. 

Of course, things are even more interesting now as 2 whistleblowers have come forward from Trinity. The definition of a whistleblower is "a person who informs on a person or organisation regarded as engaging in an unlawful or immoral activity". I've discovered that Trinity staff were sent an email warning them not to talk to us (or the press), once again being advised that Trinity "do not tolerate personal attacks on their. . . staff" so I'm hugely appreciative of the people that have come forward. 

For obvious reasons I'm not going to divulge what we know as that would be dumb right? We were hoping that OfQual would have investigated for us, but see note above. Our concerns are still sitting with the Charity Commission so we'll wait to see what they do. As a result of the new information, we are now also taking some legal counsel to see what our position is.

Meanwhile, in line with the ethos of The MTA to always be transparent I've shared all the information that I was given with the wider college community, and I guess IF the Trinity external arbiter fails to uncover the truth then it'll be down to me to get the truth out. However we're a way off that, as it seems only fair to let the Trinity internal investigation run its course, and I'm looking forward to chatting to the arbiter.

You see we all have a reputation to protect, and just because some charities are bigger than others, it doesn't make their reputation any more valuable. I spent 14 years building a college on a foundation of integrity & transparency, and that is the relic that I want to be leaving as a legacy.  In the meantime though. . . keep reading their letter

Levelling Up not Dumbing Down

I'm not really sure how this happened but over the past few years, the idea of elite training has become a bad concept, synonymous with "exclusive", and frowned upon in an era when everybody should be able to access everything. I mean the roots of this are plain to see - elite training comes at a cost, and for the majority of people those costs are prohibitive. Similarly for lots of people "elite" training is seen as a thing steeped in a western culture vacuum, thereby blocking off so many brilliant pathways before we even get going.

I believe that elite arts training should be "inclusively exclusive" and by that, I mean that our industry is so much richer with a diversity of voices, different ethnicities and different demographics all coming together as one to create an arts scene that is vibrant and evolving. However, I don't believe that we should become a "lifestyle" industry.  I 100% believe that training in the arts makes people well-rounded, gives confidence and should be compulsory to all children, but I also believe that it's OK to have a space where the best of the best train, and in those places, it should not be the buyer's market. Selection for that training needs to be robust and selective. I'm so proud that in the 14 years that The MTA operated we never once lowered our standard. Even when financially it was a struggle, we found a way to make it work. Personally, the thought of accepting somebody that I truly believed was never going to make was abhorrent. I would have been nothing more than a grifter.

Somehow the arts have been dumbed down so much that the only equivalent that I can think of is if the National football team had to try out everybody that was vaguely interested in kicking a ball, and more than that they had to put a few keen but useless amateurs on the team. . . just cos those people really wanted to be in the team. It's ludicrous, isn't it? Yet that's where many colleges are now when it comes to vocational training. 

We can't keep using the argument of "inclusivity" as a way of dumbing down elite training. We need to find people from all walks of life that meet the standard (and my goodness there are hundreds of them) and then we have to fund that training.  We need talent scouts going around youth groups, dance schools, and state schools ensuring that it's not just the nice middle-class kids that know about vocational training. Soccer scouts actively start looking for their next stars from 13 up so this isn't a unique concept. We should have a national network where talented youngsters are scouted, nurtured (in their home environment) and then at 18 undertake "elite training".

Why have we become satisfied with mediocrity? What's the thinking behind the "cream will rise to the top" in overcrowded colleges - as that cream battles against a wave of at best "average" but very often "not that good"? We're ripping off the people that are electing to train with us if we're accepting them knowing full well that they don't stand a chance of making it.

We're in an overcrowded industry as it is, and year on year we're just piling more "highly average" out into it, meaning that lots of extremely talented people leave our profession earlier than they need to.

I've genuinely lost count of the number of conversations I've had with people that came to work at The MTA because all of our students were good, the shock on people's faces when they realised that all of our students could sing (and by that. . . I mean sing well). We were a musical theatre college for goodness sake - shouldn't that be the norm? I'd hear story upon story of how college X had a handful of brilliant people but all the rest were. . . well. . . average. 

UK training is considered to be one of the best in the world, hell that's why so many colleges make a handsome profit overcharging overseas students. It's supply and demand, isn't it? Yet if we keep dumbing down our training industry we end up devaluing our arts scene, and at one point that was a big old jewel in the cultural crown.

We have to fund elite training though - and stop lying to people that £9K/year pays for it. Those colleges perpetuating that myth have devalued their own training, and eventually, I fear they too will pay the price for that Tory bit of spin. We need the government to be supporting the arts scene like they support elite sports. We need that support to be properly regulated.

We need a proper qualification for that training, a degree isn't the one, it just sits uneasily within our industry. Like a funded apprenticeship scheme or something, properly regulated from start to finish. 

Where people are looked after and not treated as conveyor belt fodder. Funding needs to be attached to results, and not to worthless bits of paper. 

Back in the day of the PCDL colleges had to prove their track record, the funding wasn't automatically gifted as it is nowadays to every degree course out there. Our industry needs to wake up to what's happening - the dumbing down of our standards as everybody chases the pound. Now if that's not a metaphor for Tory Britain I don't know what is.

 

Trinity's Reponse

Very happy to share this as requested - my response along with supporting evidence is now with OfQual and the Charity Commission

Trinity's Response  

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.