Last week, it was reported that the Scottish Institute of Theatre, Dance, Film and Television had gone into liquidation. The college, formerly known as MGA, was a contemporary of The MTA, so I had monitored its growth with great interest. I had (wrongly) assumed that they were bucking the drama school crisis trend when they announced their swanky new premises last year.

Now I guess I’m in a unique position to discuss this, having been there, bought the T-shirt and worn it with the humiliation that you feel when your college is deemed no longer financially viable. However, it also allows me to state that the powers-that-be within that organisation would have been aware that things were not looking good for a while. I likened our journey towards liquidation to being the driver of an out-of-control lorry. You try everything you can to change course, but ultimately, you crash into the wall.

If, for some bizarre reason, they weren’t aware that their lorry was careering out of control, then that raises even bigger questions around the management, and indeed the university validating their degrees (in this case Bath Spa).

With all that in mind, I found it shocking that the students found out about the closure online via social media. I completely understand management’s not wanting to front it with the students—even typing this gives me PTSD-type flashbacks of how ill I felt having to tell both our current students and our incoming students that we were being forced to close. The abject shame of having to take a zoom call a few days later with the incoming students and their parents, knowing that we still had their deposits (and they were unlikely to get them back), knowing that our closure had (at least in that moment) devastated the students-to-be dreams, whilst being confronted with accusations of a cover-up around the Trinity debacle and the sudden loss of funding (both issues investigated by our liquidators and both issues proven to be exactly as we reported them. . . no cover-up, just really sh*t timing).

However, leadership isn’t just about celebrating the good stuff. As the Principal and CEO, it was on me to name it. It was irrelevant that the person needing to front it was the person about to lose the most. It was the least we could offer the people directly affected by the news. We coordinated emails to ensure staff, students (past, present and future), parents, and supporters all found out before we went public on our social media accounts. In fact, by the time our socials were running with the news, everybody had had a few hours to digest the information.

Given that we’d seen the metaphorical lorry gaining speed, we also ensured that our students (both present and future) were given a concrete offer from a college running an equivalent course to ours, still in London (so no accommodation deposits would be lost). We also committed to working with the students to find an alternative course should that one not be a good fit for them. I had already called several other Principals to see who could accommodate our soon-to-be collegeless students. I felt we had no choice but to be solution-focused for them all.

It is appalling to see students from the Scottish Institute on their social media holding up their dissertations and asking who they should hand them to. Where are Bath Spa? Why didn’t they step in immediately to offer practical help to the most fundamental issues?

I remember thinking the same when ALRA closed in a similar fashion, just a few months after The MTA had first announced its closure the year before. . . . yup. . . let’s never forget that I had to go through the bulk of that shame twice (because once is never enough).

There is a broader issue here, too, which I discovered myself both years we had a closure announcement. Other struggling colleges (which, at the moment, seems to be a phrase that you can attach to a large percentage of them) were swarming in on our students, tempting them with ridiculous offers to secure at least some further funding for their next academic year. Courses and colleges that were not fit for purpose were all over the socials under the guise of being helpful. I’ve already seen this pattern replicated for the impacted students in Scotland.

Mopping up another college’s mess is a lucrative win/win for a college that is itself struggling. Students, scared of ending up with no place to go, end up taking an inferior course, with inferior training, which won’t give them the career that they want, but rather pop them on the pile of graduates who thought that they’d be industry-ready at the end of their training. For this reason alone, Bath Spa and/or the management of the Scottish Institute should be ashamed of themselves.

As always, I leave with the same statement I’ve made since 2019—they won’t be the last. There are now too many colleges and courses on the edge of survival. Nabbing the students from yet another liquidated college is just putting off the inevitable.

Grim times… but we can still put students first.