The CIT Cork School of Music, which was forced to cut staff and syllabus last year, has found the money for a new BA course. But will its third-level expansion be at the expense of the school's tradition of part-time tuition for younger students, asks Mary Leland

THE INTRODUCTION OF a four-year BA (Hons) degree in theatre and drama studies at Cork School of Music (CSM) may be welcome, but it also begs the question: how can the school, still suffering from the controversial cutbacks imposed on syllabus and staff last year, afford such a course at this point in its financial history?

Ed Riordan is deputy registrar at Cork Institute of Technology (CIT), the organisation to which CSM, like Cork College of Art and Design, belongs as a constituent college. The CSM budget, although not how it is applied, is thus dictated by CIT.

“As with every other public body, times are tough,” says Riordan. “But our president,Brendan Murphy, has made the valid point that while our budgets may be tight, that doesn’t mean we won’t be developing new programmes. This is something which, strategically, we have to do, despite the Higher Education Authority budget reduction of 6 to 7 per cent across third-level education for 2009.”

Possibly anticipating the imminent announcement of a national higher education strategy advocating more collaboration between third-level institutions, Riordan forecasts some merging of CIT and CSM courses in areas such as music-related computing, technology and multimedia studies. Also, CIT has added more than a dozen new degree programmes to its own current CAO listing. The marginal cost of starting up a programme is, Riordan says, something the institute can bear, especially as, in this case, the CSM “has very fine facilities with qualified lecturers already in a position to deliver much of the course”.

This is confirmed by John O’Connor, head of the department of wind, percussion, voice and drama studies at CSM.

“We have professional, highly trained teachers of movement and voice here, in line with the school’s tradition of training people as interpretative artists,” he says. “Also, this is to be a vocationally driven course in the best sense of the word, providing everything required to work and to survive in modern theatre.”

As that “everything” includes more than 23 different modules, it seems that CSM will have to augment its teaching staff. The validation panel which provided the academic qualification for the degree (CAO code CR700) consisted of Geoffrey Colman, head of acting at London’s Central School of Speech and Drama, Andrea Ainsworth, voice director at the Abbey Theatre, actress Fiona Shaw, Liam Halligan of Storytellers Theatre Company and the Gaiety School of Acting, and Marion Wyatt, director of theatre studies at Coláiste Stiofáin Naofa in Cork (this last is a college of further education from which a number of students have access via a “progression path” to CSM). The panel had no qualms about possible duplication of theatre-based studies in Ireland, and Tony McCleane-Fay, artistic director of UCC’s Granary Theatre, sees the new course as a welcome addition to drama training.

“We need an alternative to UCC, especially as ours is a largely academic programme, although it has wider choices at MA level,” he says.

Dr Geoffrey Spratt, director of CSM and a former lecturer in UCC’s music department, also describes the difference as a matter of horses for courses.

“CSM is run on the conservatory model, and the defining feature of a conservatory is the study of the student’s instrument, including the voice,” he says. “For that, you need conservatory-trained teachers, and we’re fortunate because our 120 staff members are willing to deploy themselves in so many ways other than their specified teaching disciplines.”

JOHN O’CONNOR ADMITS that the furore over budget cuts last year means that the introduction of a new degree now is “obviously a sore point”.

“But we have found resources for the first year by reducing provision in certain areas,” he says. “Our reading of the situation after that is that cost structures being applied next year will allow provision without cutting existing hours, and that there will be direct funding for every student that we have at third level only.”

“I want to make sure that nothing damages what it has taken 130 years to develop,” insists Spratt, who describes the progression structure at CSM as something like a pyramid, with a wide, comprehensive base narrowing as it moves upwards. That movement begins with the (recently constrained) flexibility of the school’s admissions system, which gives access to more than 60 courses through four different departments and sometimes as many as eight grades. For more than a century it has been from this cohort of young part-time students that the musical pyramid ascends to its postgraduate peak. This is the base, and the tradition, so fiercely defended last year by the CSM Parents Association. Spratt insists that it has now been accepted that parents are stakeholders. “They’re not our problem, they’re our supporters,” he says.

While there are fears that an emphasis on expanded third-level provision will dilute the CSM’s focus on growing its own senior intake from childhood up, Spratt believes that there should not be a problem for an institution delivering higher education to continue embracing one aspect of its delivery, that at first and second level.

“It’s an inescapable fact that to bring a performer to even a modest standard takes 10 to 12 years,” he says. “But we don’t have a calculation which recognises the whole-time equivalency of part-time learning, the one-to-one teaching which is an essential attribute of music education. I don’t understand why we can’t be honest about it; it’s been going on for centuries, has a honed methodology, and we know there isn’t a quality alternative.”

That junior pupils – all of whom are fee-paying – should be such a difficulty is an organisational hangover from the rationalisation of educational structures back in the 1980s, when the Department of Education decided that salary levels at CSM should match those at CIT. This decision led some to argue that teachers earning third-level salaries should only teach third-level students, rather than younger students as well. In response to this, John O’Connor contends that “the salary scale reflects the nature of the work, not the age of the pupil”.

Nonetheless, in 1999 the Hardiman Report on the operation of CSM indicated a need for more degree opportunities at the school, and the new theatre and drama studies BA course is advertised as “the first of a suite” of third-level courses there.

RECOGNISING THAT CSM, as part of a larger institution, cannot be immune to its collegiate responsibilities, Spratt has to ensure that, conservatory-style, it offers such things as orchestras, quartets, choirs, competitions and drama productions. As a conductor and musician himself (currently rehearsing for a March performance of Haydn’s The Seasons with the Fleischmann Choir and the RTÉ Concert Orchestra), he defends the school’s reputation and identity with what might be called a passionate diplomacy. That this is going to be increasingly necessary is borne out by John O’Connor, who says that a reduction in access to the school’s junior levels was part of the trade-off demanded for the provision of the new degree and its proposed postgraduate and diploma by-products.

If there is a suspicion that more degrees at CSM will mean the eventual elimination of first- and second-level tuition there, O’Connor insists that there is an “absolute determination” at CSM to prevent such a development – at least, he says, until there is a proper alternative on offer.

“We must never allow a situation to develop,” argues Spratt, “in which the value of teaching one age group compared to another would be denigrated. Good teaching fosters learning and is not subject to age. We must not forget that the model on which we deliver music education is an inheritance, not an embarrassment.”