Memorandum 48
Submission from the Guildhall School of
Music & Drama
INTRODUCTION
1. The Guildhall School of Music & Drama,
managed by the City of London Corporation, is one of Europe's
leading conservatoires, offering musicians, actors, stage managers
and theatre technicians an environment in which to develop as
artists and professionals. The School has concerns with the Government's
proposals to phase out support given to phase out support given
to institutions for students taking second qualifications of an
equivalent or lower level (ELQs) to their first qualifications
and believes that they will disproportionately affect music conservatoires
and drama schools.
2. The School believes that the proposals
will have unintended consequences which will far outweigh the
benefits of redirecting funding towards widening participation.
Any mitigating action taken by institutions as a result of the
plans will consequently distort patterns of provision and defeat
the objective of releasing £100 million for redirection.
It is the School's view that a better and less disruptive outcome
could have been achieved by respecting the long tradition of joint
working between Government, the funding council and institutions.
These concerns are set out in more detail in the following paragraphs.
POTENTIAL UNINTENDED
CONSEQUENCES
3. The proposal to withdraw funding from
institutions in respect of ELQ students will have a disproportionate
impact on conservatoires and drama schools in general, and on
the Guildhall School of Music & Drama in particular. Performing
arts institutions make a major contribution to the national skills
agenda and to the economic benefits of the creative industries.
They are likely to be among the hardest hit of the small, specialist
and largely single-discipline institutions, and the financial
consequences of the Government's plans could put their medium
to long-term survival in question.
4. The Guildhall School currently has 112
students in this category. Withdrawal of funding for those students
would result in a reduction in HEFCE Teaching grant (T-grant)
of up to £485,549 (17% of total T grant) by 2011-12.
5. The largest numbers of ELQ students at
the School are in two areas: acting (30.16% of the total student
population) and singing (24.5%). There is a good reason for this
pattern, which is typical of conservatoires and drama schools
across the country: actors and singers mature later than other
students and it is normal for them to progress to their vocational
training after a first degree in a related subject. The demands
placed upon the voice to be a successful singer require a physical
maturity that is not yet reached at the normal undergraduate entry
age of 18 or 19. Even at postgraduate level, several years are
commonly required for musicians to reach the level necessary for
a professional career in a highly competitive field. Such a pattern
of general education followed by specialised vocational training
is common in medical and dental education, for example, although
the programme structures are different.
MITIGATING ACTIONS
6. There are a number of mitigating actions
that institutions may wish to take if faced with withdrawal of
funding for this category of students. Three are proposed below
but the list is not exhaustive:
(a) Institutions could choose not to admit
them. This would, in essence, mean that financial considerations
would dictate selection criteria which is wholly inimical to the
principles of admission on grounds of achievement and potential.
Besides, there is no evidence to suggest that, at least in the
case of conservatoires and drama schools, for every talented actor
or musician that is turned away because they cannot be funded,
there is another one who has been denied the opportunity to enter
higher education as the Secretary of State surmises.
(b) Institutions could choose to charge them
the full economic cost of their tuition. In the performing arts,
unit costs are extremely high by virtue of the intensive nature
of the training. Unit costs at the Guildhall School are in excess
of £15,000 per student per annum, comparable with those of
medical and dental education, and would be outside the capacity
of the majority of students to afford. Higher fees will simply
serve to put more strain on institutions' scholarship funds (most
talented non-EU students already have to be supported through
scholarships and bursaries to meet the high costs of training
in the UK).
(c) Institutions could choose to re-design
the degree programmes to make ELQ students fundable. It would,
in principle, be possible to move ELQ students from non-fundable
to fundable status by treating them all as postgraduate students.
However, since the length of their training cannot be shortened,
the result would be a flood of high-volume (three- or four-year)
postgraduate courses which would distort the pattern of provision
in other areas.
7. Moving ELQ students from non-fundable
to fundable status would defeat the underlying reasoning for the
Government's proposals since they would no longer release funding
to be redirected in the desired way. Moreover, although it is
perfectly possible, in time, to create more postgraduate programmes,
this will require hundreds of hours of additional work in programme
design and validation. Institutions are not so well funded that
they can afford to waste considerable resources on mitigating
the effects of the Government's policy on ELQs.
BETTER PROCESS
8. There is a long and successful record
of cooperation between Government, the funding council and institutions
which has transformed the scale and culture of higher education
in this country. Institutions have never failed to assist Government
in bringing about successful long-term change in the sector, to
the benefit of all stakeholders. The weight of protest about these
proposals should give Ministers cause to consider whether any
there are any more desirable alternatives available.
9. If the objective were to re-direct £100
million of public money in support of a policy initiative, it
might have been better to ask the funding council and institutions
for their advice on how best to do this. This would have avoided
putting the future of small and specialist providers unnecessarily
at risk in the way that this announcement has. In any event the
School has, in common with other institutions in the sector, already
made the majority of its offers to students for the 2008-09 session
and it has had to do this in the absence of any clear indication
of whether the School will be able to afford to teach them. This
is a most unsatisfactory position in which to be.
10. In the case of the Guildhall School,
this is the second time in three years that the future of the
School has been put at risk by the unintended consequences of
Ministerial decisions. In 2005, a decision to withdraw fees support
for Guildhall students led to a prolonged negotiation with HEFCE
and, ultimately, a successful application for designated status.
Having completed those negotiations satisfactorily, the School
is now, just over two years later, facing the prospect of losing
up to 17% of the newly-won funding. The alternatives of radically
distorting admissions procedures, or pattern of provision, or
both, are themselves not attractive solutions.
January 2008
|
