What to expect from Higher Education

Students at Rose Bruford mostly come from either an A-level background or from doing the BTec National Diploma. Each background sets its own challenges; but each also has gaps in preparing for specialist arts education. Whatever your background, you need to expect to be challenged.

You may think that you’re going to learn more of the skills you have been developing so far; and these may be skills of performance or skills of analysis. To some extent this will be true, but it isn’t the main point. Rather than being an end in its own right, the getting of skills serves a bigger purpose. The point of HE is to understand the process of skill-getting, along with a few other major things. These will include developing an understanding of the performance industry: where it is now and how it is changing. The objective of your tutors will be to get you to negotiate your own future: not just in response to the world, but also as someone with the potential to affect and change the world.

What follows from this is that you should expect the unknown; you should expect to be challenged; and you should expect to be unsettled. In order to be really good at something it is important to have the freedom to make mistakes: just like a racing driver has to test the limit of their car and will occasionally go off during practice, HE is a place for you go test the limits of your performance. Much of the value of HE lies with what you learn from other students; perhaps more than what you get from tutors. Think of it as a discovery zone, and you are an explorer.

Often you may not get either the praise, or the level of criticism that you have been used to of your creative work. Instead, staff will be looking at the quality of your self-criticism and analysis. This is to develop your ability to teach yourself in the future, and a big shift from tertiary/FE learning. On the one hand this feels like you’re not getting the level of support you’re used to, while on another it may feel overly ‘academic’. But to make better work, you have to develop an understanding of how theatre/performance is done, but also what, in turn, it does.