David Hanson - Staff & contact times

One of the great advantages of Regent's College, generally, is that the groups are very small. We don't take in 40, 50, and 60 onto a degree. Twenty is the aim we have, and some degrees if we don't have the right level of applications we'll even take less. We've got degrees of just ten students or 15 students studying them, because we want to aim at the right profile of student and have enough time to give the individual tuition.

Our students get one to one tutorials every week, in fact, on demand. If they go and see their tutor and say, "Can I talk to you," usually it'll be if not now then this afternoon or whatever. They get a lot of individual attention.

I think that's the big difference really between a college like Regent's and a school like LSFMP and many of the other institutions who take as many people as they reasonably can then have to cut down on the amount of individual work that they can give them. In this field, in my field, and the fields we're talking about, you can't really teach people entirely in large groups. Everything is about individual creativity, and people are only helped through the development of their own individual potential and creativity.

We've got a big advantage, really, in that we started a new school three years ago. We didn't begin something out of an existing body of staff. Everyone who's working here has been appointed in that short time. So, we've been able to draw people out of industry to work here, sometimes for a few hours a week, sometimes half the time, and sometimes full time. But, they've all got very, very current industry experience.

Building from scratch means you're designing something as it should be, not inheriting a design that's already there and trying to move and change it which, in higher education, isn't always easy. So, the staff we have, every single one, has a very strong background CV. If you look at them they've all got credits on television, credits on film, credits for acting, directing, producing, writing, and so on.

Again, I think students can sense when they're talking to people who have a currency in the industry and when they're not. And that's been part of the aim and the ethos of building this school. It's a very new set of facilities, very new set of staff, for a set of new degrees.