Dancersdad

DS used to have endless problems with his feet and was given orthotics, but couldn't dance with them in. The podiatrist off handedly said a friend of hers had heard of a strapping technique that might work. You get the 2 inch non stretch strapping plaster and starting under the arch come up the inside of the foot over the top and around the back of the heel. It effectively pulls the arch up and worked. I tried it when I got plantar fasciitis and the pain vanished in about 5 minutes. We eventually discovered that it was down to shoes not having any arch support. DS now looks at shoes by sliding his hand down the sole feeling for arch support and if their is none the shoes are rejected outright. Tough choice for the fashion guru of the school who has nearly as many shoes as his mother! EHe hasn't had any problems since doing this simple check.

Thanks Robin64. I am pleased to say he is one of only 2 Tring final year students to already have a contract. He starts on the 8th of August on Costa Cruise ships (he should have been starting next week on the one that caught fire in the Indian Ocean 4 months back). He also has an open ended offer to join the South African Ballet Theatre - the top Ballet company in South Africa - after his sister organised for him to take part in their Adult Classes while on holiday out there. The Artistic Director said DS didn't realise quite how good he actually is, something we have been told time and again by EYB. Hearing comments like that from people who really know what it is like to have a career in dance certainly makes everything we have had to put up with worthwhile and extraordinarily proud of him.

I wish there were more parents like you Taxi4Ballet. It is all well and good auditioning, but for those who can't afford it you must make certain your child understands that no MDS means you can't go, even before they audition. You need to emphasise that getting offered a place means they are in the very top bracket of talent and not being able to afford it doesn't mean they are not highly talented. It only means the schools are charging too much.

Julie, as far as I know they only have 8 - 10 per academic year. They may have more on offer if pupils have been assessed out of the scheme. I do know the MDS Committee was trying to get more awards or to even try and get to the same point as RBS where everyone is means tested, but they are fighting a battle agains claims of exclusivity and the success of the CAT centres that are far more broadbased and are far more accessible than the vocational schools. Dancemad, you are quite correct. I can't believe I forgot about it as DS has this funding. It is however available for all HE students studying away from home and not just limited to the Arts

Forgot to add, neither the MDS nor the DaDA can be transferred between schools. While you may be able to get another MDS at another school you will not be able to get another DaDA at any other school unless Trinity College withdraw the school's accreditation to offer the Diploma Course or the Learning and Skills Council (or whatever they are called now) remove the ability for a school to offer the DaDA (usually only accreditation withdrawal will bring this about) and you are forced to transfer to another school to continue with your studies. In very exceptional cases a complete change of direction say from Dance to Acting may allow you to apply for another DaDA, but you are very unlikely to get it.

It staggers me how many people allow their children to audition for the very expensive vocational schools with no idea on how they are going to pay for it if they are successful. MDS and DaDA help, but these are so limited that they cannot be relied on to solve the problem at any time of the process and they are horribly misunderstood. Here are some guidelines. MDS - this is a means tested award available only to UK resident pupils at The Royal Ballet School, Tring Park School for the Performing Arts, Elmhurst and The Hammond. All pupils at RBS get an MDS and the other 3 schools have around 8 per annum that they can award. There are usually 30 - 40 young dancers auditioning for the award in each school. An MDS is awarded for a full year and the pupil's performance must stay at an advanced level to continue receiving the award. An MDS cannot be removed mid year (this from the Chairman of the MDS Committee). An MDS pays all fees associated with attending one of the schools including boarding fees. An MDS generally will stop after GCSEs where the dancer would probably be awarded a DaDA - though an MDS can be given at the school's discretion for the 6th Form years. DaDA - This is only available to UK residents over the age of 16. It is only available through certain vocational schools and is also very limited (only 254 DaDAs are awarded across the UK across all forms of performance). A DaDA will only pay tuition fees. The student must pay for all boarding fees (you could still be looking for £3 - 4 000 per term!). DaDA recipients must do the Trinity approved 3 year National Diploma in their chosen field. This is an NVQ6 Diploma equivalent to an Honours Degree. The University of Middlesex will turn this into an actual honours degree after doing 1 year's dissertation on work experience gained during that year. A DaDA may not be used to pay for A level or BTEC diplomas (following the actual curriculum doesn't really give any time to do these anyway). Funding alternatives - most of the easy funding alternatives used to be through your local council. If you could prove your County did not offer the equivalent schooling you could force them to pay a substantial contribution towards schooling outside the County. Since the start of the Credit Crunch Government has allowed County Councils to cut back on this commitment and any commitment to the Arts, so this route has effectively been cut off, but you can still enquire about it. You may be lucky. Apart from that there are some limited charities, but finding them and getting them to fund you £30 000 a year is going to be difficult. Most of them allocate their awards at the beginning of the year, before you realise you might need them. Best alternative - the best advice I can offer is go to Amazon and buy a book called Working 5 to 9 by Emma Jones (£10.13 in paperback and £4.00 on Kindle - download an appropriate Kindle Reader for your PC or other devices). This is one of the most complete and easy to read guides on starting your own small business in your spare time. It has several ideas that can be turned into genuine income generating businesses and you may find this not only funds your child's vocational dancing fees, but might lead to you doing it full time and enjoying working for yourself.

Hi all. I am the person who started The Ballet Trust and run the website. I have a DS at Tring who was only 1 of 34 dancers auditioning for 8 MDS awards when he got into the school. I believe that the same kind of ratio exists for the other 2 MDS schools (all RBS pupils get an MDS) What happened to the other 26? Has this talent been wasted because the fees are too high? I thought of a way of getting round this problem and came up with the idea to start a Charity where dancers would pay £10 per annum to the Charity as a kind of insurance against parents either losing their job or the dancers having enough talent to get into a vocational school. Based on 1 - 1.5 million dancers across the UK this would give the Charity £10 - 15 million per annum to achieve its aims. To use the word Trust in the name of a company you have to give Companies House a guarantee that you are going to become a registered Charity as soon as possible. The reason for becoming a Charity is that the trustees of the company registered as a charity are not allowed by law to benefit in any way from the Charity which would remove all suspicion that this was being done to benefit me or my family. There are two routes to becoming a registered Charity. One is to have a turnover of over £5000 and register which would then entail two sets of paperwork to the Charity Commission and Companies House with the encumbent costs of these submissions. The second is to follow a route proposed in the Charities Act 2006 and become a Charitable Incorporated Organisation (CIO) which is a company opened as a Charity with the Charity Commision and a resultant minimisation of red tape (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charitable_Incorporated_Organisation). I find it incredible that 6 years later Parliament are still wrangling over the exact nature of these companies although you have been able to register one in Scotland since April 2011. In 2010 Companies House decided to charge for all submissions and increase the number of submissions a company had to make whereas previously a dormant company only had to make a declaration they were still dormant (I was waiting for CIOs to become a reality but keeping the company dormant in the mean time). Faced with having to pump more and more money into Companies House coffers or dissolve the company I chose the latter option which is why it is listed as Dissolved. As far as the informational side of the site goes, at the time it was recommended that DS audition for Tring I hadn't even heard of the place. A bit more informed than most parents we had heard of Elmhurst as well as RBS, however, all other options were a complete mystery. I set about trying to gather as much information as possible about other vocational dance schools and list it on the site. This has not been at all easy especially when it comes to finding out fees. For interest sake once I had got some information, using Prix de Lausanne Partner Schools as a reference point I compared the fees charged in England as opposed to the rest of the world. The result came as a bit of a shock. The overwhelming majority fall in the £10 - 12 000 per annum bracket. It is cheaper to send a child to the Juilliard than Tring. The Juilliard was the most expensive school I could find outside England. One of the top vocational dance schools in South Africa costs less than £1 000 per annum. Yes, I have neglected the site and yes, I agree I should update it. The fact of the matter is I work for myself and my business has taken off recently which doesn't allow me the time to do the research required. To complicate matters I no longer live in England so I cannot rely of getting prospectuses to keep me updated and have to rely on trawling the internet for information. I still believe the site give people a good starting point and I am still enough in touch to advise people who email me to the best of my ability. I will certainly also be pointing people towards this site in future. If you have emailed me before and I did not respond it is most likely because my mail server periodically gets blocked by Microsoft who then advise blocking it to all MS Mail Servers because it doesn't have the correct MS certificate. During this time sending to some email addresses just doesn't work at all which is why you may not have got a reply. It is annoying and takes 4 -5 days to clear, but I think I have now had it "white listed" as this doesn't happen so often now. I hope this answers some of the questions raised here. Like many of you having a highly talented child has come at enormous expense to us and at time we struggle to make ends meet especially now with currency fluctuations hammering us badly. The Ballet Trust was a genuine attempt to help other people out of this dilemma, but it got hopelessly entangled in red tape amongst other things. Sorry about War and Peace as my first post, but a lot of questions needed answering.