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Ha ha me too! My nerves!

I posted a birthday picture on social media today for Dd 🥳 It was taken exactly a year ago, she was smiling and dancing for royal visitors that day and the picture later appeared in Hello magazine. I then looked back at my social media account, all the proud parent moments shared with family and friends over the passed 8 years, all positive, happy and successful. Not a hint of the trauma and the pain 😢 that we have all been through. Next to that picture on my phone I have a picture of her fractured foot that she danced on that day and then performed and auditioned on. I have never shared that

No, they haven't, but I wish they had! They all had switched to video before Christmas, but wanted different requirements as we went into lockdown and couldn't access studios. It's been interesting.

I am not sure they have agreed the same video, just the same process. It does say check each establishments own audition information.

How I wish there had been one agreed video to be used across all the schools. The literal sweat and tears involved in creating a different one for each institution, especially as daughter needed to use my laptop and I needed it to actually work on!

Oakley, mine followed an unconventional route, but has never had a private lesson or done a competition. It is possible. But you need a good ballet school/teaching, and you also need to learn contemporary and character and pas de deux as a minimum. The idea of a young person having all their teaching done one to one with one teacher doesn’t sit well with me at all - if that’s what you mean. How would you do pas de deux or learn to work in a corps? There is an advantage with flexibility, though, not being tied to the confines of a three-year course. The issue of contacts is valid, but can be su

Yes, five weeks! Hopefully by then we will have already heard from RBS. At least we know what to expect, it’s fab that they’ve communicated it out to us x

Ah, I remember your previous post I think @Twinkletoes22 In all honesty, in your shoes I think I would move school completely. As I said earlier, I think that there can be some very valid reasons for teachers being cautious about where else their students go, but to be so adamant that only RBS JAs is good enough is frankly, ridiculous. Does this school actually meet your, and most importantly, your DD's needs? There are no shows ,which your DD misses, the timetabling isn't a good fit for you and the teacher sounds rather inflexible - what are the good points that are keeping you t

This for entry to the Vocational schools. Preliminary auditions will be online, finals in person if allowed, but online if not.

Having an email off Hammond and Elmhurst within an hour of each other has almost killed me 😂😂 at least we can forget about Elmhurst for a little while xx

For a child of 9 it doesn't sound as if this school is a good fit. Only classes and exams with no performance opportunities is not good ballet training. There are many excellent Associate programmes and some pretty awful ones too, so it is impossible to generalise. But why is this teacher talking about her own Associate classes, does she accept pupils from other schools or is it just an additional coaching class for existing pupils? Something doesn't add up.

I should add I told her we intended to stay with her for ballet, our commitment there won’t change

Thanks all. The thing is my little one is only 9 years old and her current dance school don’t do shows or festivals. It is just purely lessons and exam. I feel she’s losing the will a bit because she loves to perform but doesn’t like the competition of festivals. At our old school abroad, she had both and I think she found it stressful but loved the annual show to be wirh her mates and work as a collective. She doesn’t have that at this school at all. I asked the teacher (in a bid to be transparent) about associate programs she would recommend and she would only recommend the Royal Ballets JA

Is this referring to vocational school auditions only or graduates applying for companies ?

the stored nuts will sprout in the spring if forgotten about - which is of course, what the trees are counting on!

An honest discussion could alleviate the teacher’s potential fears of losing your daughter as a student, too (if that happens to be her reasoning) - it is an understandable worry. I wouldn’t take ‘not the done thing’ as a valid reason without a more in depth conversation about it though. Agree on the point about keeping it very clear who the main school is. Teachers at other schools can let you know from the beginning if your child likely won’t fit in with their teaching plans too then (and that honesty is helpful both ways). You don’t want to be disrupting their more serious students

Ten leading professional ballet schools pledge continued support for dance students during 2021 auditions process Photo: Kate Jackson Following a joint statement issued in summer 2020, ten of the UK’s leading professional ballet schools have announced a unified message of support and reassurance today as hundreds of prospective students consider applications for places on programmes starting in September 2021. The schools pledging continued and unified support are Central School of Ballet, English National Ballet School, Elmhurst Ballet School, The H

How do we know the squirrels aren't just leaving the nuts where they are as a sort of safety deposit box arrangement? Who says the nuts have to be used during the next spring? I think squirrels should protest about all this unwarranted snooping into their food storage choices.

The mind boggles!

I used to think that this was very straightforward - you are the paying customer, and the parent so do whatever you think is best. However, over the years, I have come to see it as not quite that black and white. One thing is that the standard of teaching varies enormously from school to school, so a teacher may have good reason not to want his or her pupils attending some other schools. There's also the potential for conflict of interest and timetabling. That's not likely to be an issue if you're just doing classes, but if the young dancer takes part in competitions or there are shows

Yes, that was my feeling too. We did recently encounter a new teacher be really quite forceful about continuing and criticising us for allowing DS to take a break for his sanity (we are apparently throwing away a huge opportunity and it’ll be too difficult to catch up with the competition if we even take two weeks off). Major red flag moment. DS (very much a social dancer) has struggled with Zoom and doing too much of it risks pushing him away from dance completely - which in my opinion is way worse than not getting into vocational school this year. I got the impression student

I know exactly where you are coming from. A few years back my eldest DD moved dance studios to meet her needs. Her younger sister remained at the studio as that also met her needs. OMGosh. The grief I received from the Principal and was told ‘so when are you moving your youngest so I know when I can fill her place?’ That wasn’t even on the cards but by the end of that term it most certainly was. As it happens it was the best move ever but that wasn’t the point. As a few paying parent I should have been treated with more respect than I was. I was trying my best to ensure each DD needs were

This seems sensible. If the answer was more-or-less “change your timetable” I think I’d have a very careful think about the overall situation but hopefully it’ll be more positive than that.

When my dd was young her dance teacher allowed her to go to other schools for extra classes and dance styles which she didn't offer. In fact she even set this up on occasion. I don't know what the position would have been for styles she did offer, but I think she would have been sensitive to the issue of timetabling not fitting. On the face of it, you might think that the teacher is trying to protect her business, but if so that would be short sighted as you could just up sticks and take all your business elsewhere. There could be other reasons for her position. The

The 74% lost nuts made me wonder about other data and I see that up to 25% of buried nuts are recovered by squirrels that didn’t bury the nuts in the first place. Here’s a link although I couldn’t get to the original Richmond article. https://ssec.si.edu/stemvisions-blog/why-do-squirrels-bury-nuts-and-other-mysteries I’m not sure if you can combine the two findings - if a squirrel buries 100 nuts, 26 are recovered on average but are they recovered by the owner or a different squirrel? However our squirrel may also be recovering nuts it didn’t bury.