RSAMD alumnus David Tennant in Push Up at the Royal Court's Jerwood Theatre Upstairs in 2002. Photograph: Tristram Kenton
It's as if someone read about the terrible employment figures for Equity members and decided to fix the problem their own way. Instead of having to cope with all these resting thesps, wouldn't it be better if we just stopped training actors in the first place? Well, of course it wouldn't - the theatre, TV and film industries would dwindle away without a steady flow of versatile young recruits - but that's the likely effect of the cutbacks troubling Scotland's two leading drama schools.
Last week, the Scotsman reported that Queen Margaret University is planning to axe the course that brought us Ashley Jensen and Kevin McKidd.
Meanwhile, students from Glasgow's Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama (RSAMD) have been protesting outside the Scottish parliament about staff redundancies to make up for a £600,000 shortfall. They reckon the cuts will reduce the chances of producing the Robert Carlyles, David Tennants and John Hannahs of tomorrow.
The details of the two cases differ - as do the way the respective managements have dealt with the problem - but the underlying cause is the same. The Scottish Funding Council does not fund "conservatoire" training for drama to the standards accepted by the Higher Education Funding Council for England. For the RSAMD, this means drama students are funded at £7000 per head, even though their colleagues studying music get £12,000. This has been the case since 1992, but now the pressure on money has become too great for the institutions to absorb the additional costs.
It's a damning reflection of how the education system has become preoccupied with economics instead of learning. What the system likes are subjects that can be taught by a single lecturer to 100 students at a time. That's good value for money. What it frowns upon are the kind of intensive courses in movement, voice and acting that require a much more hands-on approach. That's a waste of cash.
The result is that Queen Margaret is planning to scale down its drama provision, ending the conservatoire training of actors, designers and production staff once the current crop of 150 students have graduated. Instead it will concentrate on the academic study of theatre. RSAMD's solution is to make staff redundancies, something that has led some students to take legal advice.
What's doubly disappointing is how feebly the college authorities have dealt with the crisis. The RSAMD staff are bound by gagging clauses, so it's taken the students to bring the matter to public attention. In Edinburgh, the management of Queen Margaret University has appeared to hold the drama department in contempt, selling the Gateway theatre which it had bought and refurbished with £1.5m of lottery money as recently as 1997, to help fund the move to an out-of-town campus where students and staff were highly unimpressed by the resources. Rather than launch a high-profile campaign to expose a problem caused by the Scottish Funding Council, it appears to have accepted defeat without a fight.
The hope now is that the Scottish government, which is so enthusiastically supporting the arts with its Expo Fund, will intervene to remind the education sector that its business is teaching students not profiting from them.
