Will Holyrood help the Scottish academy?
Thanks to its work, the mythical suburb of Shieldinch in River City is fully populated and the detectives in Taggart have plenty of murders to investigate. The Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama has also made an impact outside Glasgow. Its graduates include James McAvoy, the star of Atonement and The Last King of Scotland, and Doctor Who himself, David Tennant. Within the drama school, however, a crisis is brewing. A shortfall of £600,000 for the next academic year means the possibility of redundancies, department mergers and full-time staff being reduced to parttimers. The talk is of the woodwind and brass departments merging and of 20-30 full-time jobs being affected. The 700 students returned from their Easter holidays last week to discover the courses they thought they had signed up for – some of which are not available anywhere else in the UK – might be changing drastically.
