Opinion with Annemarie Lewis Thomas

You've never needed a degree to be a professional performer – that myth was created by colleges chasing government funding streams some 20 odd years ago and nurtured by parents wanting their children to have a ‘fall back’. Fast forward to now and vocational training is facing its own Don't Look Up moment. ALRA will not be the last casualty.

It's expensive to run a programme of vocational training, as unlike the degree model of ‘throw a hundred people in a lecture theatre with a notebook and one lecturer’, true vocational training means working with small groups of students and giving them lots of contact hours. With the current level of assistance offered by the government, the sums just don't add up.

You might have noticed an increase in ‘top up fees’ (though it should be noted that not all courses are permitted to ask for this), an increase in the number of students, and a raft of new courses being introduced. What you might not have noticed are the courses quietly shaving contact hours away or adding in longer holidays. You equally might not have noticed the number of independent dance and drama colleges that have been bought up by universities and corporations resulting in a dumbing down of elite training in the UK. People have been interpreting their ‘growth’ as a success story, whereas they may have increased in size because they were trying to balance the books and survive.

It's a vicious circle: you need more students to balance the books, so you need more studios; you build more studios, but then you need more students to pay for those studios. And so, the cycle continues. In the world of vocational training, bigger is not better.

Add Brexit into this mix and the reality is that many drama and dance courses can no longer teach any overseas students, who usually pay a premium to study in the UK. Colleges must make up that deficit in students and funding somehow… cue more students and more courses.

Our training industry was once the envy of the world, but with every financial decision that these colleges are making they are devaluing the industry that they themselves built up. The government needs to acknowledge true vocational training and base the funding on the results of that course. This really is the time to ‘look up’.

Annemarie Lewis Thomas is the principal and CEO of The Musical Theatre Academy