Plenty of jargon and plenty of framework, but I was left unsure how a graduate of the BA (Hons) Acting programme would get on in the real world. What proportion of them wind up teaching in other programmes? What proportion wind up in unrelated occupations, like flipping burgers or stacking shelves? If we knew, should we care?
I decided quite early on that HE was higher education, and so applicants might either be flexible practitioners or higher education professionals, professionals for whom the lime lights had long faded. But what does flexible mean in this context? Willing to turn one's hand to all kinds of peripheral matters, willing to teach courses in CV construction (the sort of CV which will catch a bored & lazy agent's eye) or in catering management (theatre)? Then there was the need for a sensitive awareness of something. All this for a modest £35,000 or so.
While I never got to the bottom of what the phrase 'context and the bard' was driving at, I did eventually work out that an HEI was a higher education institute and that maybe HEA was some kind of professional organisation. And I was quite right, because when I asked google what an hea was, http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/ was top of the list. Was google aware of my interest in these matters and so adjusted the list accordingly, or is this lot so well known that it floated to the top without assistance? Whatever the reason, the first two pages of the list were all to do with the academy, with one of the exceptions being (appropriately) an actor called Brendan O'Hea, who confusingly trained at Bristol rather than Liverpool and is sufficiently important to have once worked with the Dame Judi, and another (inappropriately) being something called an HEA panel, a wire mesh panel used for stabilising the faces of cuttings and embankments, made somewhere near Dublin (see http://www.maccaferri.co.uk/home/13900.html. If you get the address slightly wrong, Chrome breaks into Italian, quite wrongly thinking that this obviously Irish name is Italian).
Having worked my way through all this, it turned out that the HEA was an outfit which, inter alia, dished out accreditations to worthy HEI's. It all smelled a bit like the quality accreditation which was all the rage in the IT world, or at least the government part of that world, around the turn of the millennium. The HEA also got itself involved in the Islamic scene, more specifically in a 'learned society and professional organisation focused on enhancing research and teaching about Islam and Muslim cultures and societies in UK higher education'. I wonder if devout Muslims are allowed to act? Given that pictorial images of people are forbidden, at least in mosques, it would seem a bit inconsistent to allow theatrical images.
All good fun, I dare say. But I am very glad not to be mixed up in it all.
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