Three words sit at the top of one of the UK’s most prominent children’s talent websites: WE MAKE STARS. Not we help children develop their acting skills. Not we give young people a foundation in performance. We make stars.

Those are not my words. They are the operator’s own, on his own website, aimed at parents considering signing up.

They matter because a recent Deadline investigation into alleged malpractice at the same operation only makes sense when you read it alongside that promise. Not as an agency that made some paperwork errors. But as the predictable result of a business built on something it could never actually deliver.

The Deadline investigation makes for serious reading. Among the allegations: self-tape auditions shared with clients who were never intended to receive them; a performer who recorded an audition for a role that had already aired months earlier; a contract clause allowing commission to be taken from chaperone fees, money paid to parents giving up their own time to legally accompany their child on set; and claims of casting power on major productions that the productions themselves disputed. The agent has denied wrongdoing and attributed a number of issues to administrative error. You can read the full investigation at the link below.

But this piece is not about the specific allegations. It is about the model that made them possible. Because that model has been running for years, in plain sight, and parents have been paying into it without ever being given the information they needed to understand what they were actually buying.

Who Is Actually Being Sold To

Let us be honest about something. In the children’s talent industry, the child is not the customer. The parent is.

And the parent sitting across from a stage school or talent agency is, in most cases, someone who loves their child, has seen something in them, and wants to help it go somewhere. They are not industry insiders. They do not know how casting works, how rarely jobs come up, or what a realistic career path actually looks like. They know their child lights up when they perform, and they want to do right by that.

The marketing knows this. WE MAKE STARS. Our Stars. Training and cultivating the next big stars. Once-in-a-lifetime opportunities. This language is not describing a service. It is speaking directly to a parent’s hope for their child.

And then there is the social media. A feed of big announcements. Major productions. Famous names. Netflix. The BBC. A Lionsgate film. The impression created is that this school produces stars regularly, that the children on those posters are typical of what happens when you sign up. What you are not shown is the hundreds of other children on the same roster for whom nothing has come. The same handful of names recycled. The big wins are real. The hit rate is not.

A working professional actor typically expects an audition every few months. Parents sold on stardom are never told this.

So the parent signs up. They pay for classes, for headshots, for weekend courses, for a residential in Ibiza. They pay for years sometimes, because they were told at the start that this was the path, that the school had the connections, that their child’s talent just needed the right door opened.

Then the emails start. Polite at first. Where are the auditions? My son has been with you for a year and nothing has come in. We have spent thousands. I thought you said he had real potential. What are we actually paying for?

These are not the questions of a difficult parent. They are the entirely reasonable response of someone who was made a specific promise and is watching it not happen. The problem is not their expectations. The problem is that they were given the wrong expectations in the first place and nobody corrected them.

A working professional actor typically expects an audition every few months. That is the industry operating normally. Parents sold the promise of stardom are not prepared for that reality, because nobody told them.

The Corner You Paint Yourself Into

Here is what I believe happens, structurally, when you build a children’s talent business on a promise you cannot keep. I offer this as an analysis of how these business models tend to operate, not as a statement about any specific individual’s intentions.

You take on volume because volume feels like momentum and looks like success. A roster of five hundred children is, in the context of genuine professional opportunity for young performers, an impossibility. There are only so many real auditions, only so many appropriate roles, only so many productions actively casting children at any one time. The numbers do not support five hundred families all being in meaningful contention simultaneously.

So when the parent emails asking where the auditions are, the operator who has over-promised and cannot deliver faces a choice. Come clean: the pipeline is thin, this is normal, the original pitch overstated what the market can offer. Or manufacture activity.

And this, I would argue, is where the made-up audition most plausibly enters the picture. Not as a random act of deception but as a response to commercial pressure. The parent is unhappy. They are questioning the value of their investment. Something needs to happen to demonstrate that the machine is working, that the fees are justified, that their faith was not misplaced. A self-tape audition lands in their inbox. The child is excited. The parent is reassured. The questions stop, at least for now.

It also creates the conditions for a two-tier system. If some auditions are real and some are manufactured, and the parent cannot tell the difference, then the real ones become leverage. Spend more, attend more classes, take the premium course, and perhaps your child gets access to the genuine opportunities. The parent who is already financially committed and emotionally invested is exactly the person least likely to walk away when that implicit offer is made.

I am describing a logical dynamic that emerges from a broken business model. Whether it describes any specific operation is a matter for those with direct evidence. What I am certain of is that the model creates the incentive, and incentives have a way of being acted on.

Faginism

I have been using a word for this for some time now: Faginism. The deliberate use of children’s dreams, and more precisely their parents’ investment in those dreams, as a revenue stream. Not representing talent. Harvesting it.

Fagin’s genius was not cruelty. It was warmth. He gave children belonging and purpose and the feeling that their future was being looked after. What he extracted in return was obscured by the texture of the arrangement. Nobody was told they were being exploited. They were told they were family.

I should be clear here. Running a stage school and also managing the careers of young performers is not inherently the problem. I do both. Done properly, the two things complement each other. Training informs representation. You know the child. You know what they are ready for and what they are not. The problem is not the model. It is what happens when that model is run on volume and false promises, when the warmth of the arrangement is used to obscure what is actually being taken. Celebrating only the biggest names loudly and repeatedly, recycling the same few success stories to suggest a hit rate that the full roster would not support, while hundreds of other families keep paying and waiting.

The parent who eventually asks hard questions is not a difficult customer. They are someone whose trust was solicited and then not honoured. By the time most of them realise it, they have usually spent enough that walking away feels like admitting the whole thing was a mistake. So they stay. One more term. One more course. One more chance.

What Ambition Actually Looks Like

I run a school and I manage careers. So let me tell you what I think this should actually look like.

You keep the roster small because that is the only way to genuinely know each child. What they are ready for. What they are not. What kind of performer they are becoming. You do not take on a new client if you already have several who could go for the same roles. You turn down auditions that are not right for where a particular child is in their development, even if the parent is pushing for it. You tell every family before anything is signed that professional actors wait months between auditions, that most children who train will not end up with professional careers, and that neither of those things means the experience is not worth having.

You also do not measure success by bookings alone. A child who grows in craft, who becomes a better listener and a more curious person, who learns how to handle rejection without it defining them, that is a success. The job, when it comes, is a result of all of that. It is not the point of it.

Small roster. Realistic expectations. High quality training aimed at developing skills, not manufacturing outcomes. That is the offer. It does not make for a flashy website. But it is one a parent can trust.

What This Industry Can Actually Give

Fame is shallow and for most people it does not last. Selling it to parents is a particular kind of cruelty because when it does not arrive, which it usually does not, the child is left feeling like they failed. Not that the promise was wrong. That they were not good enough. They spend years feeling left behind, always one step short of the thing they were told was coming.

Craft lasts. A young person who is genuinely taught to perform, who learns to understand other people, to listen, to be present, to tell a story, has been given something that will be useful for the rest of their life. On stage or screen yes, but also in every job, every relationship, every room they ever walk into.

The industry at its best is not a lottery for fame. It is one of the richest ways a person can engage with the world and the people in it. That is available to any young person who enters it with honest guidance and real training.

That is what should be on the website. Not “we make stars”. But we will help your child find out what they are capable of, and we will be honest with you every step of the way about what this industry is and how it works.

It is a harder sell. But it is the only one that is true.

Read the Full Deadline Investigation

deadline.com — Read the full investigation here

The views expressed in this blog are my own professional opinions, formed through years of working in the children’s performing arts industry. Where reference is made to the Deadline investigation published in May 2026, all specific allegations are attributed to that reporting. I make no independent allegations of fact. This blog exists to promote honest, ethical practice in the representation and training of young performers, a position I have held and written about publicly since September 2025.