Gold-dust - and mentoring (as against MAs) for writers

When I was interviewing for The Write Guide, the first guide for mentoring creative writing, Jill Dawson gave so much valuable information that her material threatened to overwhelm the whole book. We had to work harder to give her wisdom a broader context.
Jill had taught on the flagship MA programme at the University of East Anglia; for her mentoring, from both the teaching and learning side of the business, is a positive alternative to taking an MA in Creative Writing.
Jill has now set up her own mentoring organization, Gold-Dust, with a tally of great writers who I reckon will all give valuable mentoring guidance. (They've ditched the terms 'mentee' and 'emerging writer' for the sleeker 'new writer' though I don't see why these writers can't give a welcome boost to someone who's been plying the trade for a long whie and maybe seeks some fresh approach.) A programme involves five one-on-one sessions with your writer, plus the writer engages with ten hours of preparatory reading of your work. You'd need to be able to get to one of the regional bases of these writers. A good extension of the scheme might be to offer distance learning, and so an income source for writers who choose to live remotely as well as an option similarly remote 'new' writers.
I do think mentoring is a very effective way to learn (and anyone considering it would learn from that Write Guide ... a briefer version of it to download for free comes from Literature Training). At £2000 it comes in at about half the price of an MA. An MA typically comes with forty contact hours in groups, plus one-on-one supervision of the final dissertation. The MA brings a sense of writing community with group workshop practice, which I've only ever known my students at this level enjoy, but then they are writers who have selected such a group process in an academic context. I spoke to one member of a writer's group in Plymouth who literally sprinted away from me when he learned I taught writing at the University, so clearly that route isn't for everybody! If you have a sense of a specific writing project then quality mentoring is a sound route. (I've stopped 'mentoring' myself, choosing instead to accept people able and ready to commit to a fiction or creative non-fiction PhD route.)
For me mentoring works much better than manuscript appraisal, since it is constructive, aimed at making you a better writer, rather than seeking to disillusion you (a tendency I've found with the Literary Consultancy). For new writers, scrimping to gather in that two grand when you're stuck, care for your writing project, and Gold-Dust want to take you on, looks like a worthy life-enhancing option.