Fame Acadamies Exams in rock and pop? Whatever next, diplomas in hotel room trashing and GCSEs in air guitar? Dom Dwight investigates Those who can't do, teach. It's an old cliché. And, like a lot of old clichés, it's absolute rubbish. Bruce Dickinson, director of the Brighton Institute of Modern Music (Bimm) teaches and there's overwhelming evidence he can ‘do' as well: Dickinson was one of the Little Angels, who racked up 11 Top 40 hits and a number one album, Jam, in 1993, in addition to touring the world with artists including Bon Jovi, Bryan Adams, Van Halen and Guns ‘N' Roses.

But when Nirvana's Nevermind started a landslide change in rock fashion, Dickinson and pals found themselves without a record deal: ‘I was about 25 and I discovered the economic reality that just because you have a number-one album doesn't mean you're necessarily financially independent from that point. So I started teaching guitar and writing for guitar magazines, whilst still making a living as a player. I ended up really enjoying the teaching side of things, finding that it was just as exciting as playing for loads of people.'

Fortunately, he'd kept in contact with all his friends in the music business. He knew that, like him, they were very keen to help the people coming through and so developed a style of education that was very vocational: ‘I found that people who'd made records thought about education and music differently to those that hadn't.

I always liked to employ people who'd had hits and made records rather than people who had spent 10 years getting to be very proficient players but were maybe a bit too “muso”. Of course, you need the guys who can transcribe Frank Zappa and are amazing technicians as well, but you also need the rock and rollers and the creative people, to give the students a balance.'

But some people find the concept of training rock stars somewhat sad, as if it's stripping away the romance. Says Dickinson, ‘They've got a right to worry and I'm very sympathetic with their point of view because a lot of music education is very prescriptive and a lot of it's taught by people who haven't necessarily had a career and are plainly bitter about it, so there are some problems. There are two sides to music: there's the craft and the art. The art side's having something to say, either as a writer, an instrumentalist or as part of a band. That's down to the students. You can't teach that. But the craft side and putting an environment together where people can get the best out of themselves, that's our job.'

Make no mistake, the course content at Bimm still offers a lot of factual substance, particularly on the business side, but the aim is to create an environment that's conducive to being creative.

‘When you do that the students come together and the scene is as important as the actual course content. It's like great A&R. When we set Bimm up about five years ago, there were two of us from an education background, me and Damien Keyes, and I went straight to Kevin Nixon and Sarah Clayman, because they have a background in A&R and management. The view was that education was about asking the right questions rather than telling people stuff and that's A&R – artist development. We're trying to replicate the experiences a young person would get if they got a record deal and they worked with a great manager, a great A&R man, a great producer and a great engineer.'

With about 700 students in all on courses ranging from A-level equivalents to degrees, Bimm has grown quickly – perhaps because it occupies, as Dickinson puts it, ‘a very distinct niche'.

‘We deal with live players. We don't teach music IT. We never will. We deal with it in the classroom but we want them to sound good before they think about recording rather than rushing into a studio. The college has been very successful and that's fantastic and I think that's because we occupy that niche and we deliver. We've had 14 hit singles from Bimm graduates in the last two years: The Kooks came from Bimm, the drummer from the Ordinary Boys, a girl in The Faders, Speedway … We often supply them as session musicians for Top Of The Pops and shows like that.'

But what about current students? Sarah Clark is a 23-year-old singer coming to end of her professional music BA Hons degree course at Bimm. ‘I always preferred to do popular music because I'm a singer and I just wasn't really into the whole classical and opera thing. I got far more out of doing songs that I like, by artists that I aspired to be like,' she says.

Not only is Clark delighted with what she gained from her course but she's also a model example of the kind of self-starting individual that Dickinson and the other Bimm founders hope to produce, with a fledgling business involving teaching popular music singing in schools already up and running. ‘I don't think I could be in a better position than I am now,' she says with confidence. Johnny Scaramanga, a 21-year-old guitar student who's also coming to the end of a BA Hons in Professional Music, is slighty more reserved: ‘I've met loads of people, so in that respect it's been a success. Some people come to Bimm and expect it to be alternative to appearing on X Factor. In fairness to Bimm, I don't think that's what they promise to do. But, yeah, I've got a lot of work out of it and I feel like I'm a better musician as well. I've got an idea of how to go about starting my own career.'

As Scaramanga explains his plans for the future it becomes clear that, far from churning out a production-line of uninspiring wannabes, Bimm is producing a great line in sensible kids with realistic life plans – he's already started writing for music magazines and hopes to build a long-term career out of this and gigging in function bands, all the while working in an original band, Wired, for which he has modest aims: ‘gigging regularly and some kind of small-scale success'. Now you won't hear Darius coming out with statements like that.

In stark contrast to Bimm, the University of Derby 's Popular Music with Music Technology degree has a hefty amount of focus on the technology side of things (the course name's a clue).