Foreign music students
Recently the UK government has decided to introduce a whole raft of legislation making it more difficult for foreign students to get visas (they now need to prove they have £800 a month for maintenance on top of fees), soon introducing id cards for foreigners including students - yet to see if this includes my dad, who's been here since he started his doctorate some 300 years ago - and limiting the work foreign students are allowed to do when here.
These limitations include a clever new clause, which, as it stands, prevents any non-EEA music student getting any form of paid gig in this country. This is crazy, as one of the main reasons music students come here is for the performance opportunities. Now, it could be said that foreigners are taking our jobs and so forth, but that argument is ridiculous when you take into account how much the fees they pay subsidise our own students. Me for example. I've no wish to pay £10000 a year in fees. If we stop attracting foreign students to music colleges, they will lose a large proportion of their funding and talent, top students will go abroad to more international and vibrant institutions, and this will have a pretty dire effect on the whole classical music scene in this country. Music college acts as an agency for performance contracts as much as anything, and the RNCM has been forced to take all non-EEA students off its external engagements list, something which they will have worked extremely hard to get themselves onto, and which will have funded a fair proportion of their studies. I'm nowhere near advanced enough to be considered for this, but I also don't need the money as I can take advantage of the student loans system.
Anyway, this has inevitably landed on facebook, so here's the group link:
www.new.facebook.com/home.php#/group.php
It's interesting that a friend of mine has written this on the discussion board - she is Canadian, just finishing her degree in Manchester and has been considering moving to London for a postgraduate course, the fees for which will be over £10000. She is one of the best violinists in college and I have learned a great deal from watching her perform in masterclasses with her teacher:
Jenny -
Actually there IS now a law preventing students from performing professionally, and if we're caught we risk deportation. The matter is incredibly serious - The reason I'm studying in the UK is to make professional contacts. During the last few years I've been doing recitals and concerto performances in the UK, and I've also worked with the Halle and BBC Philharmonic Orchestras, but this new law means that no one in the UK is allowed to hire me, so I'm missing out not just on money, but also on networking and getting to know people in the profession. London is one of the best cities in the world for classical music, but there is absolutely no point in studying there if I can't work professionally.
In other news, a large pub-style table-top sun-shade in several bright colours landed in my garden while I was writing this.
These limitations include a clever new clause, which, as it stands, prevents any non-EEA music student getting any form of paid gig in this country. This is crazy, as one of the main reasons music students come here is for the performance opportunities. Now, it could be said that foreigners are taking our jobs and so forth, but that argument is ridiculous when you take into account how much the fees they pay subsidise our own students. Me for example. I've no wish to pay £10000 a year in fees. If we stop attracting foreign students to music colleges, they will lose a large proportion of their funding and talent, top students will go abroad to more international and vibrant institutions, and this will have a pretty dire effect on the whole classical music scene in this country. Music college acts as an agency for performance contracts as much as anything, and the RNCM has been forced to take all non-EEA students off its external engagements list, something which they will have worked extremely hard to get themselves onto, and which will have funded a fair proportion of their studies. I'm nowhere near advanced enough to be considered for this, but I also don't need the money as I can take advantage of the student loans system.
Anyway, this has inevitably landed on facebook, so here's the group link:
www.new.facebook.com/home.php#/group.php
It's interesting that a friend of mine has written this on the discussion board - she is Canadian, just finishing her degree in Manchester and has been considering moving to London for a postgraduate course, the fees for which will be over £10000. She is one of the best violinists in college and I have learned a great deal from watching her perform in masterclasses with her teacher:
Jenny -
Actually there IS now a law preventing students from performing professionally, and if we're caught we risk deportation. The matter is incredibly serious - The reason I'm studying in the UK is to make professional contacts. During the last few years I've been doing recitals and concerto performances in the UK, and I've also worked with the Halle and BBC Philharmonic Orchestras, but this new law means that no one in the UK is allowed to hire me, so I'm missing out not just on money, but also on networking and getting to know people in the profession. London is one of the best cities in the world for classical music, but there is absolutely no point in studying there if I can't work professionally.
In other news, a large pub-style table-top sun-shade in several bright colours landed in my garden while I was writing this.