For nearly a century, the RCM and the RAM had enjoyed an essentially cooperative relationship. On the everyday level, there had been an element of rivalry for staff and students, but the joint venture of the Associated Examining Board (with its benefits of branding and financial profits), the jointly run GRSM diploma and the need to work together to secure Whitehall funding had all meant that at governance level the two institutions worked together. When David Lumsden became Principal of the Academy, this changed. Lumsden, seeing how much the RCM’s profile had benefitted from its Centenary Appeal, broke the traditional consensus with his ‘Pursuit of Excellence’ strategy for the RAM. Relations between the RCM and the RAM were further strained when their funding body (the Polytechnics and Colleges Funding Council), alarmed at the cost of music college provision compared with how they funded their other client institutions, instituted the Gowrie Review of the London conservatoires. Gowrie recommended their merger – something the RCM was strongly against – and as a compromise, the College and the Academy agreed to operate a joint Vocal faculty.

The RCM had invested so much institutional energy into preserving its independence that it had paid insufficient attention to the changing world of higher education. Now, higher education institutions were more directly accountable for the public funding they received under a new regime of quality assurance in curriculum matters and of financial assurance in respect of how funding was spent and the institution’s overall financial health. These new audit systems (with their specialist methodologies and terminologies) imposed a significantly greater administrative burden on the College which previously had been only lightly monitored by the Department of Education. Janet Ritterman was appointed Director with the specific brief to modernize the RCM administration and to enable it to meet the demands of the Higher Education Funding Council for England. This chapter looks at how Ritterman turned the College’s situation around with new administrative protocols that were initially resisted by long-established staff. At the same time, the College implemented new strategies to recruit overseas students (now financially necessary) and to establish a College Hall to house them.