Concerns about Dance School..

Thank you for the update. Glad to hear your dd is progressing well & congrats on her exam result.

I thought this thread sounded familiar! Really pleased to hear your update op, and best of luck to your dd

Glad to help

Having chatted with the OP several times and at length by PM, it appears that her concerns were entirely valid (IMHO)

I take the original post with a pinch of salt, as most of it doesn't really add up. If you take your child's dancing seriously, why have you not moved dance schools already? If an unqualified student were teaching my child, I would be out of the door, irrespective of whether I took my child's dancing seriously or not. Notwithstanding that teachers often use senior students as assistants in juvenile age classes, there should always be a qualified teacher at least supervising the class at all times.

At the end of the day, if your child is 9 and taking Grade 1, you really don't have a clue what their potential for dance is going to be yet, so that is irrelevant to this discussion. What matters is that your child is receiving safe and effective tuition. If the person teaching the class is not qualified to deliver that... walk out the door!

You say you are taking dance seriously but yet you prioritised a brownie trip over an exam??????

I was far from a good dancer or had the right physique but had competed my Grade 1 by 6 and Grade 3 by 9. Similar in tap and modern.

Clearly she is not that good if she's been dancing 6 years and has no qualifications to show for it...and the school are trying to let her down gently and keep dancing for fun...

this isn't of itself a problem if the quality of the teaching of technique is excellent

Yes I agree with this, although the OP has mentioned that her dd isn't being taught by the qualified staff at the school, and this is one of her concerns.

Some schools do use older teenage student trainee teachers which is fine if they are acting as assistant in the qualified teacher's class, but not all that great if they are teaching unsupervised. They would be unlikely to have the experience or in-depth technical knowledge of the syllabus to give the right corrections.

Madwoman, i agree that will be case in all but the largest schools. However, if I were to be evaluating the quality of a school in regard to their ballet training, I would find it interesting whether one of the successful seniors learned ballet at that school, or whether her main ballet teaching was elsewhere but she attended some classes at the school IYSWIM? Otherwise one could get a false impression of the quality of ballet teaching, when excellent quality might actually have come from elsewhere.

Most girls dancing at that level will be attending multiple schools. It's to get enough hours in, nothing to do with any lack of quality at a given school.

We have dancers from our school that also attend the advanced classes at the school in the next town on the nights that ours aren't running, and also (lol) a dancer from a professional school who attends our dance school to top up her hours in specific genres.

Dancers are total hussies, man. They will go anywhere to get the necessary hours in. in and of itself, that means nothing.

You say she dances in the festival troupe? It is that 'external' comparison that would be valuable, in deciding whether the school is being rigorous in teaching great technique.

If all the 9 year olds in your dance school are doing Grade 1, then the comparison between them is not as useful to you as a comparison externally - pretty much everyone on this thread has indicated that this is quite slow in comparison to others who have been dancing a long time BUT this isn't of itself a problem if the quality of the teaching of technique is excellent.

Well, I'm inclined to think that there's no point whatsoever in keeping 9-year-old children in Grade 1 for two and a half years. They would be absolutely bored stiff; and to be continually held back is demoralising.

(DD is regarded by her dance teacher is 'on target' to go to dance college at 18 if she wishes to - she may well not, as she is also very good academically. We had no wish to send her away at 11, and suspect that her body shape may end up too 'hip and busty' for ballet, as well as being too tall.

She will have completed the full set of Grade 6 exams - Ballet, Tap & Modern - by her 13th birthday, and also done Interfoundation ballet. As she has progressed at a grade per year, my guess is that she took all her Grade 4 exams while she was 9, though as she doesn't take all genres in the same term, she may have done 1 Grade 3 exam at 9.

However, what is more important is that I know she is well taught by a well-regarded teacher and her technique - compared with others at e.g. the national Ballet Awards - is very secure.)

Balletcoforum, by the way, is a good specialised forum for this type of discussion - the members have a wealth of experience, and may well be able to advise on well-regarded rigorous schools in your area.

I would agree with Graciesmansion that exams are not the 'be all and end all' of potential and ability in dance.

However, good, rigorous teaching of correct technique is absolutely essential - and if your plan is for your DD to be taught dance locally until 16-18, then you need to be assured that the teaching she is getting at the moment is a) a good foundation for that and b) going to get her to the correct standard for auditioning at that point.

It seems to me - though may be wrong - that a child who goes to vocational school at 11 can 'unlearn' issues from previous teaching, or 'catch up' missed technique rather more easily than a dancer who starts full time dance training at 16-18 with many more years of local teaching behind them. In some ways, I think an exceptional dancer with few years of good lessons in a particular genre e.g. ballet (e.g. KatyMac's DD) might be better off in this respect than a dancer who has had many, many years of not great teaching.

How many students from this dance school go to dance college at 16 and 18? Which colleges do they go to? Have these stuidents always danced at this dance school, or have they moved from elsewhere later in their training?

Regardless of the 'level' of exams reached at a particular age, what is the range of marks like? A high proportion of distinctions might indicate (though does not guarantee) that the teaching is good, even if the pace is slow.

When you see your DD performing at a festival, what type of festivals are these (All England? Other? There is DEFINITELY a pecking order...) What genres are the dances your dance school presents, and how well do they do? Do they win the ballet classes? Or are there other schools that have clearly better technique?

My ds did his RAD primary exam age 8, did his grade 3 this summer when he was 10 and has just started vocational school this September where they don't care at all which exams they've done. My dd has just done her grade 1 age 7 and she was the youngest in her class by at least a year, there were a number of 9 year olds in the class. Theirs is a semi-serious ballet school which had four students start vocational school this Autumn and they care much more about getting good technique when they're young and then they seem to speed up through the grades as they get older. I wouldn't be too concerned.

Just texted my ballet teacher (RAD qualified) friend. She said that if she had a new pupil aged 9 who had never done ballet before, she'd start them off in grade 2, and if they already did modern, they would probably be able to move up to Grade 3 after a couple of terms.

We've known a couple of dance schools do the Disney thing. It's fun for the kids, but a pain in the arse for the fundraising. They went to Florida, I hadn't realised that Disneyland Paris did the same package. The most recent Disney trip in one of the other local dance schools got cancelled due to not enough kids signing up for the trip.

Incidentally, for those who may be interested, any dance school can take a group to Disneyland Paris - you can simply book for the group workshops, and if you want to perform, then send in a short audition DVD of a performance similar to the one you want to do, which they then check over. There is a minimum number of participants.

The website says that many hundreds of dance groups, singers, marching bands and choirs perform there every year, and to book in plenty of time.