Paul McCartney show will help fund Fame students’ bursaries

Feb 20 2008 by David Higgerson, Liverpool Daily Post

CASH from key cultural events – including Sir Paul McCartney’s Anfield concert – will be used to help Liverpool’s Fame School lure the country’s most talented performing arts students to the city.

The Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts (LIPA) is one of two organisations that will receive cash made from a ticket ballot system set up for events including the Liverpool Sound concert.

Today the Daily Post can reveal the money will be used to help LIPA compete with the country’s more established arts institutes to attract the cream of artistic talent to its courses.

The Liverpool Culture Company expects LIPA, along with another charity, to share around £300,000 raised from the ballot for June’s event at Liverpool FC’s ground.

Details of the plans emerged as LIPA revealed they had put plans to become a university on hold.

LIPA had planned to ask for permission to award its own degrees, rather than using John Moores University to award them, but has been put off by the £100,000 start-up costs involved. Mark Featherstone-Whitty, founding principal of LIPA, said: “The plan is that we set up a scheme where money can be used to attract the country’s most-talented students to LIPA.

“This will be especially important if the Government allows tuition fees to rise, because this will create a situation where the universities with the deepest pockets can offer the brightest student bursaries to study with them, as happens in America.

“If tuition fees do rise, we will have to see what the competition is doing before we decide what we do, but if it happens, as expected, bursaries and similar money incentives will become increasingly important.

“As a relatively new institution, we don’t have those deep pockets, partly because we don’t have the same number of former students to call on, in the same way other institutions do.

“Getting this money is great news, because it means we can compete with other institutions and, hopefully, increase the chances of getting more students who go on to great success, and in turn promote LIPA.”

Last week, the Liverpool Daily Post revealed how academics in the city feared a Government review of tuition fee caps, believed to be scheduled for next year, could lead to university graduates spending their whole life repaying tuition fees.

The Government insists it has yet to decide the remit of that review, but experts say they expect a greater burden to be placed on students.

In a separate decision, LIPA has put plans to become a fully-fledged university – and therefore award its own degrees – on hold. All institutions awarding their own degrees can only do so through a Royal Charter or an Act of Parliament.

Initial talks had taken place with the Government about the plan for LIPA, which in 2006 became the first institute to win designated higher education status after setting up from scratch – allowing it to apply directly for state funding.

Prior to that, it had been under the umbrella of JMU.

Mr Featherstone-Witty added: “The most important issue for students is the quality of education they receive once they go on to higher education.

“We explored going for univer-sity status so we could award our own degrees, but the administra-tion costs would run to more than £30,000 a year with start-up costs of more than £60,000. That is money we’d rather put into front-line services for the time being.

“It is something we may look at again in the future, but for the students, it doesn’t really matter who awards the degree. Some of our courses have 65 people competing for each place, so our reputation is already out there.

“We just need to make sure we can continue to compete and this is why the money from Liverpool Sound will be so important.

“We aim to ensure our courses provide the mixture of academic and vocational study needed to have the best possible chance of success in the future.

“Especially in the fields we cover, the competition can be fierce. Very few actors in Equity actually make a full-time wage from it.

“For us, it’s important our students go on and have success so they can support us in the future.

“Our ethos is, and always has been, to get the best possible students and the best possible teachers.”

Between 80% to 90% of students have a job or an agent within three months of leaving LIPA.

The Liverpool Sound concert is one of several key Capital of Culture events for which people had to enter a ballot just for the right to buy tickets.

It takes place on June 1 with tickets ranging from £35 to £75 in price. The other charity to benefit was the Nordoff-Robbins Music Therapy charity, which will use the funds to significantly increase its therapy services in Merseyside.

Bryan Gray, Chairman of Liverpool Culture Company, said: “It was a unique ballot and one which will benefit both the public and the city, not least through the support for LIPA and Nordoff-Robbins.”

davidhiggerson@dailypost.co.uk