The Music Education Podcast
Listen for authentic and challenging conversation on all things music ed. Brought to you by Charanga. Hosted and produced by Chris Woods of The Chris Woods Groove Orchestra.
The Music Education Podcast
Episode 39: How To Make A Music College with Kevin Harding
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
In this episode Chris chats to Kevin Harding the founder of the Academy of Music and Sound about music education and profit.
Welcome to the Music Education podcast. I'm Chris of the Chris Woodsgroove Orchestra, and this podcast is brought to you by the Soundstorm Music Education Hub. Now, profit and music education isn't something that gets discussed particularly widely, which is kind of strange because the private and public sectors are increasingly intertwined. And in fact, even within the public sector, there can still be a profit element within that. So I think this episode is a really important one because it engages in a conversation that really we don't hear very often. But by listening to this, you're about to hear a conversation with Kevin Harding, who is the founder of the Academy of Music and Sound, which is one of the UK's most successful music colleges and music education businesses. Now, Kevin starts off by giving us the story of how the Academy of Music and Sound came about, which is quite literally a how to build your own music college. It's also an incredible snapshot in to different periods throughout history that are really relevant to music education. And then later we get stuck in to some of the business elements behind music education establishments that really aren't very widely talked about, and certainly for me, I didn't really know about. We talk about things like venture capital and equity investment or employee ownership, stuff that we're not really used to associating with a conversation about music education. But actually, these ideas are deeply intertwined with some of the biggest music education establishments on earth, and indeed the smallest. So learning about this stuff is a real eye-opener into how music education establishments function and the effects that these things have on music education as a whole. I know you'll enjoy listening. Kevin, thanks so much for joining me this afternoon. Can we start off with a bit of a who you are and what you do?
SPEAKER_01Okay, so my name's Kevin Harding, and I'm the founder of the Academy of Music and Sound. It is a national network of music colleges that started here in the southwest of England just as a small guitar school and expanded to being one of the uh largest national networks of music colleges in the UK. And we offer everything from private music lessons right up to a master's degree in music in partnership with the University of West London. I say that, but um I am actually retired from the business now. Um but uh for the last 27 years um it's been my baby really.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, you you're the man who built it then. Exactly, yeah.
SPEAKER_01With the help of a great team, I think it's always important to say that with um uh not just because it's something to say, but because I've always been a great believer. If you sound if you surround yourself with a great team of people, you've got absolutely every chance of success. If you uh don't, then you won't be surprised at the outcome.
SPEAKER_00Well, I guess a place to start, Kevin, really, is to ask why you set up the Academy because obviously it's been hugely successful and it's branched out and it's uh I don't you you can tell me exactly how that happened within the story, of course, but what was the need to do that? Because my understanding is if if if a good business idea you know comes from a a need for something, I guess.
SPEAKER_01I I I think first and foremost, it it sort of happened um very organically. Um it wasn't by design at all. Um, I started out as I'm a guitarist and um a jobbing musician at the end of the day. Um I moved, I lived in Torquay, which um and Devon is one of the largest um engager of musicians outside of London. Um, because of the two um coasts of um venues, of um holiday camps, pubs, bars, hotels, we've got the North Coast and the South Coast, it's a it's a very, very rich uh county for for musicians and entertainment. So that's why I'm here in this area. And um I realized that actually fairly on that not just to supplement my um gigging money, but I wanted to work with music instruments, so I started working for a local music shop. Um I then established my own music shop, and I realized that actually having a music shop really doesn't make an awful lot of money, it's it's a bit of a hobby thing, really, when it's small. So I had a recording studio down below, which was fantastic, and we had a guitar school up above, so it was a very small business. Um, but back in the sort of late 90s, it became clear that people were getting into computers and recording and buying digital audio stations, and we didn't really have as many customers coming into the studio as we would have liked, and quite understandably, you know, paying for a few days or a week in a studio is quite expensive, and um, especially in this area where there are a lot of solo musicians and duos, they just thought, well, we'll just buy the digital equipment and record ourselves. I then realized that there was I was selling the equipment, but the people that were buying the equipment didn't really know how to use it, so it became clear that the studio could supplement its recording studio bookings by doing some training. So at that point, I um contacted all I had to actually buy out-of-date equipment um to be able to deliver the only sort of qualifications that were around in sound engineering and music technology. I literally had to go and buy um a real-to-reel machine, but that wasn't what people wanted to learn on.
SPEAKER_00Um in order to be accredited, if you like, you had to go back into the past. Yeah. What what a what a fantastic thing. That's hilarious.
SPEAKER_01And it was great, you know. I thought it was fantastic, but the customers didn't. They just wanted to know how to use software and how to use, but the only qualifications were really were there were full-time ones with um with BTEC. So in the end, I sort of contacted BTEC and I said, Look, I don't really want to reinvent the wheel, but I need to be able to offer music technology training um in a in a modern day world, not using out-of-date equipment. So they went, okay, we'll put a proposal to us, so I did. And they said, Well, we have a suite of qualifications called center divised. So um this will work well for you. Until that time, they primarily offered um full-time qualifications, and I didn't want that. This was for weekend warriors, it was for hobbyists who wanted to be able to just learn how to use the gear uh uh you know of an evening or of a weekend. So we we had to first of all go through the the um the process of becoming a validated and approved center for edXL. So I did that, and that was successful, and then we wrote a suite of level two, level three, and level four qualifications, just short courses, 120 hours, um, and the studio became full up with people just coming in and uh and it was quite small. We made sure we only had six people in the studio at a time. So when you've got six people, then you can give a really good quality of training. If you've got 20 people in a in a in a studio, it's much more difficult. So the qualifications became very good and then um very popular, should I say, and but at Excel said, well, you can't just deliver them out of your little studio in Torquay, you really need to expand this out. So um at that point, I then started exploring where else we could go. London was just awash with um music production and music technology qualifications and and studios, but Birmingham didn't. So um, and to be honest with you, the it started out where I was looking for another shop. I thought, well, here's works really well. If you have a shop, people come in the shop, you can then sell them um guitar lessons and you can sell them courses. So I started looking for a shop, and one of our suppliers said, Well, Kevin, I'd really love to support you in Birmingham, but um Sound Control have just bought out musical exchanges and they want to offer all the music books that we we would supply you. And he said, With all due respect, they're gonna turn over millions, you're gonna turn over a few hundred thousand. Who do we upset? And I went, Well, fair enough, you upset me. And but the MD said, Well, look, why do you even want to go to Birmingham and open music shop? I said, Well, I don't really, I just want to be able to offer our causes and to offer the training, but that's a good um place for us to start. So he said, Well, why don't I connect you with sound control and let's see how that goes? So I met with Sound Control and they had a phenomenal shop they were taking over in in one of the biggest music shops in Europe. But of course, they also didn't want to be taken on three floors, three stories, because it's a staffing cost of having so many people covering all those different floors. So they said to me, Why don't you take the top floor? And really, this is about um footfall, this is about you creating a business of training that brings lots of people into our store who buy the gear. So that's how it all started, really. So I we we took the space on in um Birmingham above sound control, down in Snow Hill, and it was fantastic. We we ran the same courses we'd run here, and then it was a bit of providence that um the deputy or vice principal of Bourneville College came in one day and they wanted some help with a um a recording studio that that they were um they they had been offered, and they wanted to they but they didn't run music technology um qualifications, so I agreed to take over the um the delivery of the qualifications, but these are full-time ones, um, in exchange for them um becoming a funding partner for the full-time courses at our centre in Birmingham, and that's how it all started. It worked very, very well, but at that point I was actually also very aware of how many people were leaving university and colleges with music technology, sound engineering qualifications, etc. And let's be absolutely realistic about this. At the time, there wasn't that many jobs around. You you could, you know, there was probably a hundred jobs in the whole of the UK for sound engineers at the time in recording studios. So um I was very much a lot of the of the feeling that I'd started out as a guitar school and I really needed to look more about the guitar side of things, yes, including the music technology and the music production because a guitarist needs to be able to put together demos and their own recordings, but to really focus on instruments, and so that's how I approached it with um Bourneville College, and they were fantastic, they were really, really good. They said, Well, we get it, so we that they then funded our um uh our guitar course. I want I wanted to write a guitar course again. I didn't want to reinvent the wheel, so um BTEC did have a guitar call a course that we could adapt to suit guitar, and I think that's very important. The majority of the courses you get at colleges are generic, and it's how you then adapt it to suit your particular market of an audience. Again, this all happened in May, um, and that was in 2004. I suddenly was in a situation where in Birmingham I had a uh a premises that I could start delivering a guitar course from, and then uh just out of just sheer coincidence, Manson's guitars in Exeter moved out of their building into a new store, and their old building was vacant. And I sort of said to Hugh Manson, Well, could I have that as to deliver a guitar course from? And he went, and uh, yep. So all of a sudden, in in the May, um, I had two centres um which I had to fit out and write a guitar course, and that that was obviously too much for one person to be doing. So I I sort of explored who would be the best people to um help me put together a guitar course, and all rows pointed to a chap called Sean Baxter, who um had a column in Guitar Techniques magazine, and he also was one of the founder members of the Guitar Institute in London. We got together and he said, Well, I'll write all the guitar course for you. Um, and uh that's how it started. So by the September, I was um literally in every single um those two music shops, Sound Control and Manson's, promoting our full-time guitar course. And uh we started in uh September 2004 with about 20 students in Birmingham and about 20 students in Exeter, and those 40 students eventually became over a thousand full-time students across the country, and it was again it worked very well with sound control because sound control saw the model. We were still delivering our music technology and music production short courses, but we were now delivering full-time guitar courses, and I mean, specifically for guitarists, um, I took the view that yes, we could do a generic course and had and have every instrument coming along um and joining a course, but for me, I felt that it was and it was just my own personal opinion, and it was mirroring what the guitar institute did and Guitar X and other places in America where they developed like a diploma for guitarists. So instead of using learning music theory on a keyboard and then trying to transfer that that knowledge into a fretboard, you do fretboard theory instead of you know keyboard theory. So and all the lessons that Sean devised were all around the guitar, and it worked uh phenomenally well. Uh, sound control then said, Well, look, we'd like you to open in Southampton, in Edinburgh, Glasgow. So essentially, we we we took over the unwanted areas that they had in their music stores and set up new new colleges in each of those premises, which went very well until 2008 and the banking crisis, and then um all the shutters came down on all the sound control stores, so that was a problem. But we liaised with the landlords and we managed to keep going and it could stay in the same places, bar bar one and and uh it eventually just continued to grow our business. Um, I think round about that, just a little bit before that, it was clear that the drummers and the bassists and the vocalists were all going, well, we'd quite like a course for us as well, because at that point they had to go to London to go to drum tech, bass tech, vocal tech. Um, I think ICMP had then started doing um vocals, um, drums and bass as well. And then, of course, there was BIM down in Brighton, but there wasn't anything anywhere else, so there wasn't anything in Newcastle, there wasn't anything in Exeter, there wasn't anything else in Birmingham, apart from normal college, and this is not to decry normal colleges. Normal colleges offer something that we don't, but for us, we took people in small numbers, it was it was still very small, so they it was almost like a small community, and we never really had any more than about 150, I think, at the maximum, uh, students, full-time students in one of our campuses, and it meant that that music community, we knew all the students, we were able to look after them, and it is quite a challenge looking after 16 to 18-year-old students who have left school and come in for their first music qualification with you know all the issues that they have. So it's not just about the music delivery, it's also about the pastoral care.
SPEAKER_00So at that point, you're delivering FE stuff only, right? So BTEX, etc. Um, so what sort of spurred that move to the higher education and you know, how did that happen?
SPEAKER_01So a lot of our students would automatically leave us and go on to BIM, but of course, from a business perspective, that wasn't great because we were just handing over students to a competitor essentially. So um we looked to divide, you know, writing our own degree program, which to be fair was Sean Baxter's mainstay. He'd written degree programmes, not FE in the past, so he'd almost had to go backwards to go forwards by writing the the FE courses and then on to the degrees. At that point, um, our college, Bourneville College, introduced us to the University of Wolverhampton in 2009, I believe it was, and we were very, very again, timing as I mentioned it earlier on, it's absolutely crucial. We happened to turn up to the University of Wolverhampton when they were developing a thing called Performance Industry Pathway Scheme, and it was essentially a creative industries degree program at foundation degree level with theatre musical theatre, music production, uh music performance, various elements, and they pulled together um really good local colleges to develop their specialism. So one of the colleges specialise in the musical theatre, another college, city college, um specialise in the music technology and the music production. But I didn't have anybody specializing in the music performance, and uh Sean and I rock up at the the the uh um uh at the university saying, well, we we just specialise in performance on the day that they were having their meeting to design this whole pathway scheme. So we what what was intended literally just to be a an introductory meeting to say hello to um John Pym, who was the um the faculty head there, we suddenly got found ourselves taken into another meeting where all these colleges were assembled to write a foundation degree, and um it was just divine providence, I suppose, because it worked absolutely fantastic. Um we joined them and we wrote a foundation degree program, had it validated, and it meant that our students finishing a um a BTEC FE program at 18 years old were then easily able to just segue straight on to our foundation degree. We then developed a BA honours degree top-up, so just a single year where students could progress if they wanted from the foundation degree, just do one more year to do a BA honours top-up, or go out into the industry and work. And that's that worked fantastically for us. Eventually it became clear that um we needed to be able to offer something online, or we were in a great position to offer something online. One of the great advantages of having Sean Baxter as the as our academic director was uh we invested heavily into writing our own course materials. So the teachers didn't deliver or develop or deliver their own course materials. We developed it all in-house. We had a head of drums, uh Paul Elliott, we had a um a head of bass, Kev Saunders, we had a head of vocals, and we had Sean writing the guitar stuff and overseeing the whole thing. And we developed our own online um platform um learning system through Moodle where we could actually um put all of our course materials online for students to not only have at home but also in the classroom and for our teachers as well. We'd already started doing videos of some of the lessons, so some of the techniques and that sort of thing. So if a a student missed a lesson at home, they could just log in, view the course material, and watch a video. And when were you doing that then, Kevin? That was banned. In 2000, well, right from the start in 2004, we had we developed our own course material. We never had teachers use we we decided to go for a centralized system where Sean oversaw all the quality, and essentially the teachers they had this great resource, they didn't have to use it, but the majority of them did because why would they suddenly spend every hour developing something that had already been developed? So it worked very well, and it became clear that once we started doing videos as well, there that there was always audio examples. Sean, for every single lesson of like, for example, on guitar, if there was an example, he'd record the music example so they could hear each one for each lesson. He also recorded um backing tracks so they could play along, and also musical examples at different tempos for them to play along. Um, and I'll come back to that because that was quite a key thing about students being able to practice the exercises faster than they could actually do it very well. But by playing along with the very fast tempo ones, when they went back to the slow tempo ones, they found it quite easy. So it was a bizarre sort of turnaround because normally you think, well, you need to practice everything really slowly, and not what we had reverse psychology. It was, yeah. And uh so it was very clear that we absolutely needed to um put this online, and the University of Wolverhampton were fantastic because they said, Look, they took a bit of a leap of faith in us, and they said, Yes, we'll allow you to develop um a blended learning degree. Um, what that meant was that rather than a student just being entirely on their own in a bedroom doing a whole two-year degree program, they would at least once or twice a semester come into the the the campus.
SPEAKER_00So I mean I mean blended learning is something that we now talk about, I mean, so much, but actually looking back in time, that must have been pretty unique actually. No, we've talked obviously a lot about the University of Wolverhampton, but I I don't see them mentioned on the website. Anymore. So I'm fascinated by then the relationship with um London College of Music, University of West London, that kind of thing. You know how how how did these different relationships come about? It's just fascinating the idea of an education business like yourself working with these big establishments. So yeah, tell us more.
SPEAKER_01There was a a point in time where there were some problems with the um the our our programme had finished with um the five-year degree program that we had with the University of W Wolverhampton to come to the end of its natural life and its validated life. And that was the point when I I thought, although it was quite harsh at the time, but I really wanted to know that if we were going to do an online degree that we could market around the world essentially, uh a British good high-quality British music degree, we needed to move to a London university with a a good reputation. So um Sean had when he started out in his music education career, um, worked for the Guitar Institute and also what was then Thames Valley University, and he validated with his team um the very first popular music degree in the UK. Now, you know, ever every university or many universities offer a popular music degree, but the very first one in the UK, I believe, was the Guitar Institute and Thames Valley University. Well, TVU then became the University of West London, and they bought out the London College of Music, and some of the team that Sean had originally developed the first ever degree with still worked there. So we went to them and said, look, we'd really like to validate a new degree. We've come to the end of our five-year term with Wolverhampton, um, and we'd like to develop a uh a London degree because it's more marketable to around the world, and they they they were very happy with that. Um, I I believe they just parted company with BIM at the time, so they were shorter numbers, and suddenly we turn up and they said, Well, we'll take on all of your campuses, we'll offer you your degree, um, provided you can get all the validation done across all the campuses, and that's what we've done. So we then then now have an online degree through uh University of West London, and also in all of our campuses, um, a uh actually now a bespoke one called Music and Sound, um, especially for us, it's an exclusive degree that's offered through the University of West London, and uh that's really that that it's the rest is history, really. Just to bring you right to full circle, I started all of this back in um 1994, and um we started the current uh range of uh um courses where we did instrument specific courses from 2004, and a couple of years ago we celebrated, well, I celebrated 25 years in music education, and I sort of thinking, well, that's it. I I've I've done a lot within music education, but I haven't actually done my own music career the way I wanted to as a finger style guitarist and composer. So last year um I explored what I could do about that. I'm now um 60, and I didn't really want to be just full-time in business um forever and ever. And it's also about bringing in new blood blood. Um, you know, I I've been the driving force behind the business, but eventually you you tire of it, and that's not good for the business. So it's about my sons now are working in the business. We had a great team of employees, so the natural um thing for the academy was to look how I could exit the business to um sort of semi-retire and to do my own music, but more importantly, how the business would go forward, and it would have been a very easy thing just to sell out to a competitor. I mean, that's what BIM did. It originally sold out to a venture capitalist. I believe um Deep DBS, Deep Blue Sound have done the same thing now. It's it's a it's a it's a it's a very good out for the people who are selling because it's big money and um it the numbers grow quite big in those new new businesses. I just didn't think it was right for our business. Um, I think the branding would have either gone, um, it would have meant that it would have probably laid off staff in head offices, and uh it would have just been very difficult. And it wasn't really the legacy I wanted. So um I explored other opportunities and it became clear that an employee ownership was um a good way forward. But you know, you can't suddenly expect your staff to go um off borrowing huge amounts of money from banks and remortgaging their homes to buy you out, whereas um an employee ownership um is exactly the opposite. They don't have to do that, so they don't pay any money up front, they take over all of the shares. And weirdly, Sean, who had become a shareholder as well with me in the business some years before, um, he was like, Well, actually, I'm I want to get on with my music career as well, of performing and writing. So he said I'd be up for for handing my shares over as well. So we transferred 100% of the shares that Sean and I owned to our staff, to an employee ownership trust. It's the first ever employee ownership trust in music music or music education or education, period. To our knowledge, it's the first one, so it's a groundbreaking one. And um, it's great because effectively, as far as the staff are concerned, their jobs remain as is, the branding, the company remains it is, but now that the whole company is run by the employees for the employees and the students, and um it's it's been absolutely fantastic. Um, taken a uh its toll in terms of getting it going, especially being the first time. But uh now they're they're doing very, very well. I think the students like the fact it's not some big corporate company that owns it, that all their student loans are going to some you know to some Chinese conglomerate, it's going to the actual place they actually study.
SPEAKER_00Well, Kevin, that was um a sort of a how-to-run a um music education um business uh gold dust, I think. Thank you so much for that. So I've got a million and one questions. I'm gonna start working backwards. First of all, the trust idea, um, which sounds really exciting and just such a wonderful point to get into the sort of idea of the private sector as well. How does that work, if you don't mind me asking?
SPEAKER_01Well, if you can essentially, yeah, no, I don't mind. Look, I'm I'm an open book, a transparent, you know. I I guess if anybody wants to search around, it's it's pretty much publicly documented what goes on, and I think it's very important that we are funded essentially by public money, and it's important that you you do explain to people how things work so they're clear how how how public money is being spent. Um, but it essentially uh an employee ownership trust, um, what you do is you have um a valuation of the business. So obviously, there was no point in me valuing the business because the staff will go, Well, you would say it's worth that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because I'm gonna value it at X number of millions because that's what I want. But the reality is we bought an independent specialist in to value the business. They then um put the deal together. We had it, we we used a company called Co-Ownership Solutions, based up in the north. We had three quotes from different companies to do the employee ownership, but we felt that the guys up at Co-Ownership were very personal, they it wasn't a corporate type of thing for them. There was just a couple of uh a lawyer and another chap that looked after us, and uh and and funny enough, the lawyer turned out to be a great guitarist and a and a fan of Sean's music. So David always helps. It always helps. We just got on with them really well and we clicked with them. So they held us through the whole process. We had the independent valuation. We then looked at the term of how long that valuation so this the the company had paid nothing up front, there was no upfront fee. We just literally divided the um the valuation over a number of years. Um, Sean and I decided it wasn't very fair to lumber the business with a short repayment time because let's say, for example, let's say the business was worth a million pounds and you say to them, right, you've got five years to pay for it. They've got to suddenly come up with £200,000 each year, which means the business is not able to then invest in itself, invest in its staff, invest in its students. So we decided to take the view that it would actually be better to go sort of 15 years to actually repay the loan. For me, it's like a pension, and for Sean it's like a pension. Um and yes, it would be lovely to have all the money up front and stick it in a bank and be safe and to be able to put it, invest it in something else. But for us, it was about the legacy and and and the fact that the Academy of Music and Sound is run by the staff now, it's got the same branding, the same team. Um, they they're able to invest their profits into which is what they do do, they reinvest into the the centres, the studios, the students, the teaching the curriculum, and they have full 100% control of it now. So that's what's that's what's really really great because you cannot go to any other music college in the country and know that that music college is actually being run and owned by the people in the building that you're you're being taught by and who you're dealing with, and the managers and everybody.
SPEAKER_00That's really cool. So so how does that then you mentioned the other colleges, your BIMs, etc. Um how how does that work? You mentioned even um DBS venture capital and that sort of stuff. So is that is that a reality then that quite a lot of private colleges are owned by yeah, sort of the conglomerates who we don't know who they really are, if you like.
SPEAKER_01And now there is an there is an advantage of that, of course, because when you um I think they're they're they're better known as equity investors. So I know that uh that BIM are no longer owned by Sovereign Capital, but but back quite a few years ago, the first one was through Sovereign Capital who purchased um BIM. So um now what these um and I have to say we met with Sovereign, the guys were really good there, we explored that opportunity some years ago, but just decided it was too soon and not the right thing for us either.
SPEAKER_00And to put that into perspective for uh people like me who you know uh don't know about this stuff, Sovereign Capital might be someone who they might own factories, they might own a food brand, they might own hundreds and thousand houses that they rent out.
SPEAKER_01It could be just anything that my understanding, my understanding is with with the original owners of BIM, they managed um three 300 million pound pots of money. So people, yeah, people who want to put their money, don't know what to put their money into, they put it into an equity investment um plan. Uh I think it's normally about a 10-year plan, and they they manage that money. I I believe they buy a lot of retail things like Fat Face, I believe, are one of the examples we were given about sovereign, they they put their money into Fat Face, they they put the money to all sorts of businesses, and they give that business approximately seven years to grow. And let's be absolutely clear: this is the big advantage of equity investment. They put they have huge, huge pockets with lots of money in. So, whereas the private investor like me perhaps to do something that has to invest very slowly over a period of time, reinvest in what they've got, an equity investment company can throw the bells and whistles at it. So, with BIM's example, they bought out BIM in in in Brighton, you know, they then took over tech music schools and spent five million quid on a new campus, you know, they spent five million here, five million there. To me, five million is another world altogether. You know, for me, raising half a million would be a major issue, let alone five million. And so there is that advice, and that's what BIM didn't, and they did it incredibly successfully, Sovereign Capital. They set up BIM in Brighton, in Bristol, in Manchester, in Dublin, and um they were but let's be very clear about it. Although they put their masses of money and masses of investment on it, they want their meat on the bone, and there's a period of time where they the the business has to then produce huge profits to be able to return to the investors, and and to sort of the business value is much higher. Sovereign capital, I believe, um I don't know how many millions they put. Somebody banded a figure around sort of they'd spent 50 million on BIM over over a number of years, and then they sold it out to a Chinese conglomerate fairly recently, so they've got their money back and a profit, and so the the people that have invested in that net equity are happy because they've got their money back and some sovereign capital because they've got their their profits, and I I guess to some degree the students are happy because they've got fantastic facilities. What I would say is though that on the other side of the coin, although they're in fantastic facilities, they can afford to have the very best teachers in the country because they pay really, really well the teachers. I'm not so sure about the community and the size of the classes because it's about it's a numbers game, it's about maximising the amount of money that that business can make. Whereas for us, it was more about the quality of the curriculum we were delivering, the uh accessibility of that curriculum as well, and having also also not everybody wants to be going to a massive, great, big institution where they're just a number. You know, when it came to academy, you you you were known, yeah, everybody knew your your name personally, all the staff, all the teachers, you felt like part of a small community because and that suited a lot of musicians that perhaps didn't want to go to a big university, a big college campus, or to to BIM and such like. And and and you know, the only I guess some the only problem is the size of BIM, it's they've grown, I think, from when they took over BIM, it's probably what 1,500 students, they're over sort of 6,000 students now. You know, it doesn't take much to to realise, well, something has to give when you've got that amount of students, it's about the the money, and it has had a negative um impact. I know I know quite a few um you know, music departments in colleges and universities have have just almost been forced to shut down because they can't compete, even with university, and they can't compete with an equity-invested business like BIM. So I think as a student, you need you know, uh fair play to BIM. They've opened up in very cool, funky places where young people want to go, you know, they're very happening places and and they've got a cool vibe. But you are a number in a in a in a in a very, very big uh machine.
SPEAKER_00I think isn't isn't there uh and I apologise because I am just basically a massive hippie, you know, so this is gonna come out and probably sound a little bit on the hippie side, but it isn't there just this a big conflict of interest anyway, and I get I guess to take it to its most extreme, it just in any form of profit making, we could take it down to just offering a private guitar lesson, but especially when we get to this big size where there's this you know behind a closed door drive to make profit, don't don't we then risk obviously the quality of teaching community you've talked about, for example, but even things like the pastoral care the safeguarding things, if profit is the priority, that we do we must those things must fall at the wayside, or is that just my you know sort of cultural perspective?
SPEAKER_01Not necessarily. At the end of the day, BIM and and DBS and all these other uh competitors to what we did, they can't just go out there and deliver these courses and cut uh make cuts or make savings in crucial areas. Safeguarding is key. It doesn't make any difference whether you've got 6,000 students or six students. The actual safeguarding is exact has to be exactly the same. You know, there are laws that have to be abided by. Well, because they're just scaled up, so you know one safeguard to the same. They have that many students. I'm not being funny with them, but it doesn't take much to work out what how much money these organizations are getting. Um you know, a simple calculator, if if you take, you know, just say 5,000 students uh and multiply seven and a half thousand pounds per student or nine thousand pounds per student, you can see exactly what's going on here. And and that was the other thing that I did with the academy. I felt that students were being strapped with very, very high debt right from the year off. So when we did our foundation degree, although the competitors were selling theirs for 7,500, we did ours for £5,995 because I just didn't want the students having that much debt, and the other advantage of coming to us was people were able to stay living at home and they didn't have to go and incur high debt by rent and all the rest of it. They could stay at home and still study on our course. So, although we were quite local, having places in Exeter, Southampton, Swindon, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Newcastle, all over the place, Birmingham, it meant that students could actually come to us in a quite small. There is an exception to this one actually, and this is quite an interesting one, it's ACM. Because ACM was um bought out by a chap called Kane Clements who eventually bought my Birmingham centre off me because um at the time um BIM wanted to go into Birmingham and then ACM wanted to go into Birmingham, and I I desperately didn't want to be in the same city as BIM and ACM. And the old owners of BIM, and I have to say, Sovereign Capital honored their agreement with me as well, that we were like, let's not go. We all met up and said, let's not go in the same cities because if we're in the same cities, we're all delivering the same type of instrument-specific calls and just competing with each other. We're better off being in located in different areas, different towns, cities, and whatever. And we've always primarily focused on sort of you know, we're in Gateshead, we're in in Exeter in Southampton, they're not massive cities, so it worked very well for us. Um I mean to be fair, Glasgow, you know, it really is a big city, and so was Birmingham. And when they both decided to rock up in Birmingham, I was like, well, enough's enough because I'm gonna be spending all my time fighting a war, a recruitment war, against people that I can't compete with. I don't have the the deep pockets that that that that um that BIM have got. But I felt that ACM, who, you know, let's be honest about it, ACM were around before BIM. I felt that ACM offered quite a good solution because they were not equity invested, but they were privately owned, and I felt that they would do uh and but they had the size, and I think at the time they had about over 2,000 students, and I I really thought that they had a good handle on the quality and etc. So um I invited um ACM to look at our business in Birmingham, and um we did the deal with them. Now that was much to the annoyance of Bim, who you know I was talking to Bim as well about them taking over the Birmingham centre, and to be honest with you, in the end, and you might find this quite surprising. I decided well I had a great team of personnel in Birmingham, and and David, the manager there, was just a lovely man and was really into the you know making sure this worked best for the students, it was always about what was the right thing for the students and the staff. So, in the end, um I I let David choose between BIM or ACM. Now that could have, you know, rather than me saying this is who I'm gonna send to sell to based on the amount of money I'm gonna get for it, I'm gonna let the staff choose. So they they went and had a tour of um ACM, they they'd been around BIM, they'd they'd met the people from BIM, they'd done their own research and they said, Look, we'd rather work for ACM. So that's what happened. So I I sold out to ACM and they took over our Birmingham centre. And what that meant was I wasn't sending all my time having a bun fight between those two big organizations. I was able to spend my time looking at the business model that we currently had and looking to evolve it, um, particularly the online model and doing that right. Unfortunately, it meant some cuts because two of our centres just weren't making any profits. That was Swindon, and that was primarily because Bristol was just along the road, and that people decided to go to instead of staying to a small college in Britt Swindon, they went across to Bristol. That was understandable. And to be honest with ones in Southampton, we had two universities in Southampton, and we were con and they had fantastic studios to be fair, great teaching facilities in in Southampton. So, in the end, we decided look, let's cut Southampton and Swindon. We got to the end of our leases and then just um packed up, and it allowed us to really focus on uh Scott, two Scottish centres, uh Exeter and Newcastle centre, and on our online degree, and really focus our business on that and growing it well and right. Um, it it's not so much always about scale of numbers of campuses, and um, you can get carried away with that. I think there's an old saying in Business um turnover is um vanity, profit is sanity, and you can apply the same to musical. Right, we've got to have music colleges here, there, and everywhere. And I and I've got to absolutely say straight away, there is one organization that I'm a huge fan of. I think they've done a fantastic job, and that's um they were called access to to music, they're now um I think access uh active to creative. Um they're privately owned by um uh a chap that's invested in it, and they've grown their business very well. And they have a uh pretty much like the Academy Music and Sound, a national network of music colleges. They have they are fortunate in the fact that they have their own direct funding um through the through the for their FE students, which the Academy never had. We always had to share with a partner, so but that they're they're a good organization, and um but it's for us it became less about all the vanity of having we've got centres here, there, and everywhere else. It was about having sufficient profits to be able to pay our staff well and to provide the right resources for our students, but to also um develop our online degrees. So uh we we relooked at that, we had a lot of help in terms or guidance, should I say, and advice. In the end, we decided to use the we were originally going to call it a different name, our online degree, but in the end it was decided that as academy music and sound was often shortened to AMS, we'd just go AMS online. So AMS Online, I think it's.uk, is uh went from strength to strength, just very slow numbers incrementally each year, specifically aimed at the um market of professional musicians who were already working in the industry, and in particular at the American market of masters. You can't teach in America without a master's degree in music, so it was a very good thing for us. So we've now got a um an international team really of people working around the world who um offer the mentoring and the support. You can understand you can't necessarily have somebody, a student in America, on a different time zone getting the support from somebody in the UK. So we've invested in that to get the right um mentoring and the right support. And the University of West London have been absolutely fantastic, they've supported us throughout the whole thing. They've even held up as us as a model for other departments to look at their online degrees because it's again, it's not about numbers for us. It has been to the equity investors, it's having masses of student numbers for us. It's about the quality, the mentoring, the and having great success with a small number of students is actually far more rewarding to us and the the staff to know where those students are after they've left us and to for them to keep in contact with us, it's far more rewarding to know that than just to have thousands and thousands of students over where you just become a corporate. We're not a corporate, we've never had those ambitions to be corporate, and the the beauty now is by being a um an employee ownership trust, it never will be a corporate, it's owned by the musicians for the musicians. It's a simple thing.
SPEAKER_00Wonderful, wonderful. Could you give us the simplest breakdown of how funding works? Because I've uh obviously talked about the private sector, but this obviously uses public money from different places. I mean, that could be really confusing. Even I mean, we've talked a lot about hubs um on these uh podcasts because we're we're funded by a music education hub. So, but even even that, even though we've talked about that, can sometimes seem like this confusing world of you know, here's private, here's public, but that's not the case, is it? Can you explain how it sort of works from B Tech up?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I think from if you're a 16 to 18 year old, you can't leave school, you have to continue your studies until you're 18. So therefore, you have a choice of staying at school and going into sixth form, leaving school and going to an FE college, or taking on an apprenticeship. Um, now I'm not saying that that's all the roads, but I think that's the generally what people do. We used to deliver apprenticeships, I will come back to that in a minute, so it might be worthwhile talking about apprenticeships because it's a very interesting subject, especially for musicians. Um, so we we for an FE student coming to 16 to 18 years or old, a lot of them staying on at school wasn't what they wanted to be. They know they wanted to be professional musicians, so they they came to a college like Academy of Music and Sound. At that point, um, if a student is under 19, then they are entitled to uh um funding, but of course, we don't get that funding direct from the skills and funding agent um agency. We have to actually um have a partnership, so we partner, we've been very selective over the years about which colleges they have to have the same ethos about with us about the music community and the welfare of the students. So we partner with a uh a college, and essentially that college draws down the funding because that's they have a direct route for that, and that college has an absolutely integral role, and so a lot of people seem to think, oh, well, they're just taking a top slice, which yes, they do, but actually, that college does a so much more. The college not only deals with all the administrative side of things or the enrolments, they also do that. It's not us personally that have an Ofsted inspection, if you know that happens, it's that college, right? And therefore, they play a key role in the actual um all the elements that we deliver with that. Now, safeguarding, we have to work, we work with the colleges with all of their safeguarding systems so that we know that we're we're doing it right. At the end of the day, let's be clear, we're just a bunch of musicians that love teaching people uh music. What we never set ourselves out to be was massed English teachers, um uh uh enrollers on public systems, dealing with safeguarding, all those little things. We never set out to do that. So, consequently, to have that fantastic support by a college by our side, that that's great. It's worth its weight in gold, it really is. So, those colleges do that element and they work with us. They come down, they they come, they actually walk into our centres and sit in on lessons and make sure that lessons have been delivered in the right manner to that so because it's essentially it's not us that's being judged, it's them. We are a partner, uh I guess I guess you call it a subcontracted partner. We just deliver the music elements of it, they deal with the other other elements of it. So, um, and it's important that we go to their partnership days where we learn from other partners because they have these partnerships across quite a few different sectors, and we learn from those other partners about how they do things because we're not perfect, nobody's perfect in this world. We get some things wrong, but but our college partners are the ones that keep us on the straight and narrow, they're a fantastic guide, and and we bring them something because we bring them very high-quality students, you know. We have incredibly high success rates because students are on a course they want to be on on their own instrument, so you know it's it's we bring a lot to them, but equally they bring a lot to us, and and I and I think that's probably uh something that most people thinking about oh, I I could do this, I could go and set this up. Well, actually, no, it's not as simple as that because when you go through all the the red tape, the bureaucracy, all the things you have to do, you need a partner, you cannot do it on your own. You cannot access the funding on your own, you have to do it with a college, and then you've got to find a college, and we have had you know, we've had some bummers, let's be honest about it, over the years. And some of our colleges have not turned out to be exactly what we expected. Uh, we've had to leave them because we found ourselves essentially just feeling like they're employees. Well, we're not their employees, we are an independent company that delivers um high-quality training on their behalf in partnership with them. Um, not to be have the sort of like the whip held over us and cracked up whenever they feel like. So those it's been taken a lot of years to find the right college to work with with the same ethos and also ones that were prepared to take small numbers because you know their mum should pretty certainly do an FE course as well, you know, but they've got big numbers, and that's much more appealing to a college to know that they've got big numbers. But we found um, in particular with a new college Swindon, that's one of the colleges we we partner with. They they they had their own music department. We were in the same city as them, but we weren't actually competing with it because we were offering something very different. But the whole music department, the whole the principalship, all the support services, they really work together with us fantastically. So that's the first thing you know, you that's how funding works. We don't get all the funding, the funding goes to the college, the college takes what it needs to do all of its side of it, and then we get a bit for doing the actual delivery of the music elements. Alongside that, you have to deliver mass in English. If a student has been failed at school and doesn't achieve um a GCSE English and mass at grade C and above, then they when they finish their GCSEs, and this goes for all schools and colleges, they have to continue doing that, retaking until they they achieve it. So we've suddenly found ourselves also having to deliver maths and English. Well, that was never anything we bought into when I set up the academy. It was like we're here to teach guitar, bass and drums and vocals.
SPEAKER_00Not maths and I I wasn't aware of that at all. So well, speaking, someone who who um got a D in maths, um almost wear it like a badge of honour. I probably shouldn't, should I? But so it you can be totally focused on music being your career, you decide to go um to the academy to do a B tech popular music or music performance, but you got a D in maths, um and the government tell you that we must you must continue to to keep going to you get a C at all costs.
SPEAKER_01What what happens if you don't? Well then you you you can't you you can lead a horse to water but you can't force it to drink. If if if a student isn't going to put the effort in and pass, what we as a uh an education facility have to do, we I I guess we come at it a slightly different angle as well, because I guess when you're at school, and and I really I really don't want to try and criticize a school here, but if if that student hasn't achieved a grade C at school, then clearly um the student hasn't engaged with that process. And let's be honest, I didn't do very well at math. You actually did better than me, Chris.
SPEAKER_00Oh, you've you've beaten me.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I I I did even worse. But and I'll tell you the reason why, because my perspective of math when I was at school was well, I didn't see much um point in learning subtraction and division. For me, I I always took the view that well, if I've got a pound, I want to know how to multiply it and how to add to it. I'm not interested in sharing it, so therefore I'm not doing any division, and I'm certainly not going to give my money away, so there's no point in doing subtraction. So I only ever learnt how to do multiplication and addition at school. That was my well, it's worked out for you alright, isn't it? But essentially, I regret that because there are lots of times through my life when I've needed to have better understanding about so I I had to go back as an adult and relearn all the things that I should have done because I failed what was in Lendo's my o levels at mass. I had to relearn that stuff because you can't run a multi-million pound company with without understanding you know the other sides of mass. But kids these days, you know, if they're not engaging, what we did at the academy, our teachers were specialists able to apply being a musician, how these mass apply to them as a musician rather lots of minus figures then a lot of time doing it.
SPEAKER_00But but what what I what I'm really regardless of the because I mean that's another podcast in itself. I mean, I would probably my point would be like, well, actually, maybe you just can't pass that matter to it. So, what happens when you get a student who is excelling at BTEC music but isn't has got to the end of the year and they still haven't passed their GCC masters. What's the man?
SPEAKER_01There's nothing, there's there's there's there's no consequence.
SPEAKER_00Okay, great, great. So we still walk away with our BTEC.
SPEAKER_01But there's a there's a financial consequence on the institution for not having got a uh a student through uh the ignition mass. Oh, okay.
SPEAKER_00So there's bonus wow, that's this is fascinating, Kevin. And I think I think so many educators will you know be fascinated to understand that level of right, wonderful, okay. So that sort of functions in that way. I just I didn't realise at all. And with the colleges as well, when you're talking about these various partners who are essentially, I suppose, accrediting you. Now, do they uh do they exist again in the sort of gap between private and public sector, or are they f completely government funded and they're looking to work with people like yourselves because that increases their government funding, or how does it work there?
SPEAKER_01Or is it gonna yes it does because it it is a numbers game with a college? A college is tasked, they get allocated X amount of numbers, and that doesn't make any difference whether it's in Scotland or in England, they're tasked to hit their targets, and uh we help them fulfil those targets because we're you know we're we're bringing numbers to the table. Let's be honest, it's very small numbers, but very high quality small numbers to their to the to the party. The other thing I would say is it's not just about the the the direct funding from uh for a course. Um there's also once you get over 19-year-olds, so uh a 19 somebody who might be 22 years old, for example, might say, Well, I was I was pretty like I was, I was pretty terrible at school. I better I better go back and start relearning, which is what exactly what I did. And um then they're in a problem because they're outside of the funding, so they can't get 16 to 18-year-old funding, and there isn't funding for 19-year-olds, so they have to pay for it themselves. Right. So, now there is some little pockets of funding out there, and some, but essentially, if a 19-year-old plus student wants to do the B tech, then what we tend to find is we crash it in a in a shorter time frame for them, or they can stay with us each year, but they have to pay themselves. Now, they again, because we're partnered, it's only right that they actually pay the money directly to the to the to the college, and then a college uh offers exactly the same service to that 19-year-old student, but they're a they're they're a private student at that point when they're over 19, until they get to university. And let's be clear about it when you are at university now, although you are funded through the partner university for delivering their course, uh you know there's a there's a bit of a fine line now between whether you count somebody as a student or whether you count them as a customer or client. Because really and truthfully, that student is having a student loan, and therefore it's important for us as an organ well has been because I'm no longer part of it, but as an organization, to provide them with the service that they are happy with for the amount of money that they're getting into debt with because they're getting a student loan. Now, occasionally a parent will come along and go, Look, I don't want my kid getting a debt, I can afford it, I'm gonna pay for the fees directly myself. So some students don't have a student loan, but those that do, they're a customer at the end of the day. That you've got to provide them that service and everything that they've signed up for that they must absolutely get. Because if they don't, then quite rightly they complain, and that's exactly what we've seen with COVID. With COVID-19, students aren't getting what they they signed up for, and they're extremely upset. No, no, we've been hammered by this as well. It's extremely difficult to have been able to have followed all the government guidelines and allow it make sure that these students achieve a qualification. But I think for us, what was very beneficial was we already had our online degree, all our online stuff, so it meant the students weren't there, was none of this rush to suddenly put everything online, our students were already having everything online at home. We were able to focus primarily on the pastoral care and that, and because we were small, we were even taking Macs around to our students' homes for them to work on out of our Mac because they didn't have any, you know. When you're small, you can do that. When you're a huge organization, you absolutely cannot, not easily anyway. So literally, myself and our staff, we were driving around to all of our students' homes at the beginning of COVID. Here's a computer, here's a computer, so you can do your work, you can log in, and it it it just it was they okay that they they didn't have that community of being in the building, but at least we supported them as best we possibly could.
SPEAKER_00You gave them the gear to record that lockdown album. Yep, Kevin. This has been a very insightful conversation. Thank you so much for um well, to use that word again, all that insight into uh a world that is just fascinating. I know everyone will be fascinated to hear about. Thank you very much, and I look forward to part two. Yeah, thank you.