We are self-confessed dance addicts. Dee studied Performing Arts Management at the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts. In her final year she managed a start-up dance company called Nu Crossroads Dance Theatre. Helen is a ballet enthusiast and former president of her university dance society. She still nips off every Monday evening for her weekly Cecchetti class at the London Studio Centre. With all the evangelism about dance and yes, the odd, frustrated ambition that goes with a lifetime of pulling on pointe shoes, it is hardly surprising that we feel devoted to broadening access to the art form and providing everyone who wants it with the opportunity to progress.
We both joined the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) late last year. Since then we have been trying to piece together, in our own minds, the enormous jigsaw puzzle that is dance education. Working closely with Arts Council England (ACE) and the Department for Education and Skills (DfES), we now have a pretty good idea where the missing pieces are.
The hot topic across government when we arrived in the department was creativity, and particularly its importance in teaching and learning. The DCMS's flagship cultural education programme, Creative Partnerships, had been up and running in schools for a couple of months and was already sparking national interest. By now there are 170,000 children in Creative Partnership schools. The scheme is providing 32,352 children in deprived areas with access to high quality creative experiences delivered by some of the country's leading creative and cultural organisations. These experiences include some excellent provision for dance, as anyone who caught the dancers from Brockhill Park School in Kent performing at the joint DCMS/DfES conference 'Collaborate, Create, Educate' in June can testify. With Creative Partnerships now rolling out to twenty new areas from September 2004, we know that many more young people and their teachers will benefit.
Over the next year we will be working with DfES to look at methods of mainstreaming creative experiences into every child's education. It is clear to us that the creative education agenda is becoming less of an addition to mainstream schooling and more central to the DfES's bid to raise school standards. With this comes the recognition that creative teaching is really the same thing as good teaching, and that the best schools are those, which are prepared to be creative in their approach to everything from staffing to timetabling to the content of the lessons themselves.
Creativity is only a small part of the dance education jigsaw. Here in the arts education team at DCMS, we find it easier to get our heads around the wealth of provision if we think of it as a pathway. For each art form the pathway extends from first access, developing talent and sustaining interest to vocational training, transition to the world of work and, finally, continuing development for professional artists. It is not a perfect model, and there are actually several pathways between which people might weave. But the pathway model is still useful, in that it helps us see where people might be getting stuck en route from initial access to a sustained, life-long involvement in the arts.
Current government thinking mirrors the pathway approach, and takes a more strategic view about providing opportunities at every stage and encouraging a greater diversity of future dancers. Exploration into the pathways for dance, however, has shown that present structures allow a much narrower cross-section of the population than we would like to enter full-time vocational training and progress to careers in dance. There is a job to be done improving access to and diversifying provision under the Music and Dance Scheme and Dance and Drama Awards, the DfES's two major grant schemes to support young people in vocational dance training. Our DfES colleagues have this work very much in hand. They are looking to extend the Music and Dance Scheme in collaboration with ACE, DCMS and dance and music professionals. The long-term aim is to offer a more diverse group of talented young people the chance to receive advanced pre-vocational training, in a range of dance styles, near to their homes.
Still, stages of the pathway are less accessible to some groups of people than they should be. We have been considering ways to open up vocational pathways to more disabled dancers (spurred on in no small part by an article which recently appeared in this magazine). Companies recruit disabled dancers and audiences queue up to watch their performances, and yet these same groups are having to train the dancers themselves because of the absence of specialised vocational training.
We cannot crack this kind of problem by addressing training alone. We need to look back down that pathway, identifying specialised pre-vocational training that will allow aspiring professionals with disabilities to enter vocational schools on a more level playing field. We must also look along the pathway in another direction, and try to influence the professional sector to open up their companies to a more diverse range of performers and audiences. Only then might we see a fairer portrayal of society on stage.
We know anecdotally that almost all professional dancers employed by the Arts Council's regularly funded dance companies were trained in private studios before gaining access to full-time vocational training. If we are serious about opening up opportunities for careers in dance to a more diverse section of young people, it has to be our ambition to create alternative routes into full-time training.
It would be great to connect this pre-vocational training with provision further back down the pathway, especially with the youth dance sector. The latter is already doing so much to provide first access to dance to a very broad range of young people. The Arts Council, with funding from the DfES Music and Dance Scheme, is currently tendering for a new Youth Dance Agency. This should be established by 2004. We hope it will take big strides forward in developing provision in the youth dance sector. It will also aim to establish networks and offer advice for youth dance workers and teachers who have spotted a young person with ability and need to know where to refer them for further training.
The curriculum itself is absolutely key to ensuring broad first access to quality dance experience. Dance is in the unusual position of being placed in the curriculum as part of physical recreation. With this position comes a unique opportunity for dance teaching in schools to profit from government investment via the Physical Education, School Sport and Club Links (PESSCL) strategy. This aims to ensure two hours per week of high quality physical education and school sport for all school children, within and beyond the curriculum.
We admit that we need to do more to raise the quality and quantity of dance provision in many schools. Dance lobbyists tell us that very few sports teachers have had sufficient training in dance to feel really confident about teaching it. There are not enough quality resources to ensure that teachers can deliver a broad and stimulating dance curriculum. The combination of these factors can make teachers feel intimidated and uninspired by the subject and act as a barrier to good teaching. This damages teachers' self-esteem, while it also gives young people a false introduction to the art form that may extinguish any latent interest they have in dance.
Some excellent work is attempting to address these problems. The increasingly popular and sought-after Artsmark award does a great job in ensuring that schools deliver dance as part of the curriculum. The Youth Sport Trust, the Specialist Schools Trust and the National Dance Teachers Association are setting up a Specialist Schools Best Practice Dance Network, which will disseminate good dance-teaching practice drawn from successful projects to schools in other areas.
We are collaborating with our DCMS and DfES colleagues to see work like this taken further through the PESSCL strategy, and to try to maximise the contribution that dance can make to delivering the two hours per week target. Our efforts are still at an early stage, but we are confident that the continuing professional development programme for sports teachers (under the PESSCL strategy) will make a difference. Dance organisations will also be encouraged to get involved, delivering multi-activity clubs for young people outside school hours and providing high quality 'talent camp' activity for those who show exceptional ability.
Dance is well placed to benefit from the many initiatives for arts, creativity and sport running both in and outside of school time. At the DCMS we are trying our best to identify the needs of the sector and assess how our fairly limited resources can be used to maximum effect. But it's a job that neither the DCMS or even the government can do alone. We rely upon the sector to widen the opportunities for a more diverse range of people to get involved in dance. It must itself pave clearer pathways to vocational training and the professional dance industry, but also to the multitude of community dance experiences on offer.
Essentially we believe that all of us share a vision of the dance industry as a much more accessible, diverse and less intimidating place to be. We know that an incredible number of industry professionals, companies, lobbyists, schools and dance agencies wrestle with the same issues we do, and are making a big impact on sector development. If we work together, more changes will begin to take shape. In that spirit, we welcome a frank exchange about the issues for dance and dance education as you find them in the real world.
Dee Davison and Helen Bell can be reached at the Department for Culture, Media and Sport: 020 7211 6000