Cash crisis hits music academies

TWO OF Britain's top music conservatoires fear cash constraints may threaten the quality of their work.

The Royal Academy of Music in London and the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama in Glasgow are calling for a funding boost to help them protect their international reputation as training grounds for some of the world's most acclaimed virtuosos.

They say current funding systems do not take enough account of the high cost of one-to-one instrumental tuition, one of the main activities of the academies.

This is making it more difficult to address potential weaknesses in quality, recently pinpointed in reports from the Higher Education Quality Council, they claim.

The Royal Scottish Academy's academic board has "expressed serious concern" that pressures on resources may be "such as to threaten the quality of the academy's work", an HEQC report says.

Auditors praised the academy for its commitment to quality and its comprehensive quality assurance system, but concluded that "the continuation of staff:student ratios which permit an appropriate amount of one-to-one teaching is ... crucial to how quality is seen and safeguarded by the academy".

A spokeswoman for the Scottish academy said the outlook was bleak if proposed funding cuts were implemented. The conservatoires were particularly vulnerable as their teaching costs were high.

HEQC auditors who visited the Royal Academy of Music found the institution was facing "a period of rapid and apparently unsettling change", resulting from a management review ordered to cut costs.

Despite the best efforts of staff during this difficult time, there was a "lack of clarity in many important areas bearing on the maintenance of quality and standards", a report on the findings says.

Jonathan Freeman-Attwood, the academy's vice principal, said some of the auditors' comments displayed "a serious misunderstanding as to what constitutes quality in a leading conservatoire".

The academy was facing increasing pressure from the music profession to produce highly trained graduates who were both specialists and flexible enough to be able to compete for a widening range of jobs, he said. This meant that despite pressures on funding, it could not afford to give up its intensive tutorial system.

"The academy relies enormously at the moment on the goodwill of world-class teachers. It would not take an enormous amount of extra money to protect quality and secure our position as world-beaters," Mr Freeman-Attwood said.