ParentTaxi

Laughing at the 'Miss' comments - we have similar with the head of DD's dance school, who is Miss X to EVERYONE, from the tiniest 3 year old to the most hardened of parents ... and i suspect even to the other teachers. The other teachers are 'Miss firstname', and I can just about imagine one day (DD has been dancing there for 8 years) being able to call them by just their first names, but NEVER the head. They all address me as 'Mrs', Mrs Initial in more informal circumstances, Mrs Fullsurname normally. I'm used to it - teacher - and feel quite comfortable with the formality.

Other half of the merger, hfbrew - I don't think anyone was let out for dance classes in my day, with very few day pupils and academic lessons that finished at 6.30 pm in the winter...

Having a small smile at this one. Malvern St James is the product of a merger involving my old school, and the thought of anything as 'frivolous' as ballet happening in its once austerely academic hallowed halls is so odd as to be almost surreal! [i don't mean that ballet IS frivolous, far from it. But early headmistresses, immortalised in a series of exceptionally severe portraits, would almost certainly have thought so!]

Oh no! For DD - and she s younger, so not so many years of memories - that would be like losing her second home. Sending lots of thoughts.

DD's still wearing her first pointe shoes, more than 1.5 years in (her feet don't grow, unlike the rest of her - she's probably 10cm+ taller than she was when she first got them). She only has a 45 min pointe class once a week, and clearly has the equivalent of fairy feet when it comes to pointe, as they're still (according both to her and her dance teacher) absolutely fine. I suspect that they may not survive the upcoming transition of her ballet solos to pointe, though. I'm quite grateful - the circular chain stitch thingy that is the ONLY approved way of sorting the toes out (no stick on patches allowed) took HOURS...

I will just say ... National dance costume. Nightmare quantities of ricrac braid and, bizarrely, the re-use of an Ikea table runner, slightly the worse for coffee stain....

(Like mnemo, my particular 'strong grounding' is a PhD in an obscure area of science, which I have never used directly in a job ... though the skills and attitudes i learned from it have stood me in good stead ever since)

I suppose what I am saying is that, for families like ours, the discussions are not always about 'the optimal time for entry' into a single-destination path. Our discussions are about 'the point at which that path is definitively closed'. Some children at DD's dance school - those whose only aim is a classical career - have gone to White Lodge and elsewhere at 11 or a little older. Others leave at 16, usually to study Musical Theatre. The largest group going on to dance leave at 18, often with exceptionally good academic A-levels from local secondary schools, and study dance from 18 at the major dance colleges - and then progress to a variety of dancing and dance-related careers. Those later ages may be 'suboptimal' in terms of 'straight path to final destination', but they may well be optimal in terms of a young person's lifetime career development including all aspects of their lives. (Having had 3 very different careers myself, plus a stint of full-time stay at home parenthood, I sort of expect that everyone will have a similar kind of 'portfolio' lifetime, for which a strong grounding in SOMETHING, whatever it is, to instil an understanding of work ethic, of dedication, of grafting towards a goal, is a really useful starting point)

I think it's also worth thinking about a person 'reaching their potential' as a lifetime thing, and perhaps a more rounded thing, than simply where they get to in a performing career in dance in their early 20s. DD's dance school principal did work as a dancer in her early 20s. But it is as a teacher / examiner / dance school owner / teacher trainer that she excels, and at which she has 'reached her potential' to a greater degree and at a higher level, if that makes sense? Equally when I look at DD, talented at dance but also extremely academically and artistically able, I can see that her life may take a variety of directions before she finds the context in which she 'fulfils her potential' even in one of these, let alone more than one. I think it is simpler for parents and supporters when a young dancer has that single, outstanding talent / drive, which makes an early entry into vocational training 'obvious'. It is harder when there is more than one area of ability, where as a parent one tries to juggle e.g. high quality academic schooling with non-vocational local dance training, simply in order to keep more options open for longer. For each person saying 'she should fulfil her potential in x' there are another 2 saying 'but she can't do that because it will limit her ability to develop y and z'....

I think it very mch depends on the student, and the competition. The 'competition' can be anything from the smallest of local festivals, through the All England circuit, up to the high profile competitions such as the Prix de Lausanne that can be for some a gateway to a professional career. Equally, the student taking part can be anything from the young recreational dancer delighted to be 'doing their stuff' on a real stage in costume to an audience, to a fully-vocationally-trained young adult using a competition as a showcase for professional employers. At all levels, I think it depends on the balance between 'preparing to compete' and 'high quality general dance training'. In the same way as some local dance schools may neglect routine technical dance teaching for preparing for festivals and shows, if serious senior students focus on competition showmanship to the detriment of their everyday technique, this is a bad thing. But as long as there is a balance, the opportunities that competitions at all levels give students to learn stagecraft, take winning and losing in their stride, and experience dance as a 'performing art' rather than as an endless process of training, can be of benefit.

Excellent!

(I do think it is key to have one member of staff, preferably a form tutor or head of house or whoever is 'pastoral', who is fully aware and supportive of a child's dance commitments, who can be a single point of contact and negotiate with other staff if needed. Certainly I have found getting DD's form tutor on side a) gave me a single point of contact for a number of subjects if there is a difficult clash (e.g. final show rehearsals or Ballet Awards weekend) and b ) gives DD the reassurance that she has backup if she says she can't get something done.)

If DD gets homework not on the timetable, and she can't do it, she e-mails to say she can't do it. Her form tutor, who she has had since Year 7, is fully aware of her dance commitments, and has always been her champion if needed. It is REALLY rare, and I know that we are really lucky that the school sticks so closely to timetable.

What i would also say is that DD - like the OP's DD, a top set pupil at a very good non-selective school - has developed an extremely good sense of 'good enough' in terms of her work. She is a perfectionist, and without the discipline of time constraints might well have got herself into a spiral of spending hours and hours on homework pieces in order to make them 'perfect'. Not being able to do this has been really healthy for her - she is now a master of 'sticking to the brief' and identifying exactly what she needs to do to be successful in that piece of omework, without overdoing any 'extras' that would take up time without getting her any extra marks. Again, a really useful life lesson, and a maturity I know I didn't have at the age of 12!

DD is the same age, and with the same issue - she has no dance-free evenings, though this year her dance teacher has worked really hard to put lessons for this type of age group (she dances mostly with Y9s, some of whom have started GCSE courses) in blocks so that their time is used efficiently Luckily, her school has a very strict homework timetable, so she can predict what subjects she will get, and when it will be due in. DD has used that to make a plan for a full fortnight (fortnightly timetable at school) about when she will do each piece of homework, avoiding her particularly heavy dance evenings. On Mondays and Fridays she has 3.5-4 hours of back to back dance, so she has organised herself so she doesn't need to do homework at all on those nights, She finds that there are some pieces of homework that she can take into the dance studios with her - languages, usually Maths - some that she does at lunchtime in school (though she tries to avoid that - a) she plays netball to a high standard in school and often has training, and all her friends are from different classes and lunchtime is their main time for getting together), and some that she can do in 'downtime' over the weekend - art, DT. Her usual routine Tues - Thurs is to get home from school or, worst case scenario, after-school netball match , then sit down immediately with a snack to do any homework that needs a computer or a good writing surface. She then packs anything she can do at dance in her dance bag, and sets off, using any gaps in her dance lessons to finish them off. She has a day off at the weekend - in which she might do ;'downtime' homework, as she loves art - and then clears everything on the other day, so she starts each week with a clean sheet. She is fiendishly organised - but I see that as one of the most beneficial side effects of dance for her (she also plays an instrument, though not to a high standard ... the prospect of ciounty netball, which reared its head last year, was very nearly our last straw!) She could not do this without a rigidly kept-to homework timetabe, so if the school isn't providing this, it might be something that you want to discuss with them. Her dance teacher 'blocking together' dance lessons for this age group has also been hugely helpful - is this also something that you can propose?

DD is also highly hypermobile, and has to work very hard to keep her joints in appropriate positions. She was injured earlier this year as a result, so do take care of that.

Just as a comparison, as DD will take her ISTD Interfoundation this term, she is 12, and has worked through Grades Pre-primary all the way up through to Grade 6 before doing it. To be fair, at her school - highly reputable, long established ISTD-only school - pupils usually do Grade 6 OR Interfoundation, as they are considered to be of equivalent standard. However, since DD's cohort is quite young, in the school's opinion, to be doing the IF exam, it was felt that they should do both in order to consolidate technique and improve stamina and strength at a point when the majority of them (they are all 12 or 13) are growing very rapidly. All have been doing pointe since they passed Grade 4, so at least 5 terms - 2 years of pointe work prior to IF. All do 4 hours of ballet a week, alongside e.g. solo lessons, group work and other genres. And DDs cohort are, though recreational dancers, quite serious and of a good standard - several have been finalists in the ISTD ballet awards for each grade every year. As others have said, I'm not sure that this particular acceleration is a good idea, however talented the child.

"I would only have concerns if there were no (or very few) high merits & distinctions awarded to anyone," Apologies - that was what i weas trying to describe in my 'School B' example - in fact a smaller number of entrats from a bigger school, but with almost no Merits and zero distinctions. As the list from School A was about 60 students per term from what seemed to be tiny premises (I now know them to be something of a Tardis, but still only 3 studios), although the possibility of only entering selected higher ability students hadn't occurred to me, the simple numbers per term, all at merit / Distinction in all genres, was a decent basis for comparison, all else being equal and me being an ignoramus about all things dance!

I should clarify that i know some absolutely excellent teachers / schools will concentrate less on exams and so not have exam results available to compare. And that if you are an 'in the know' parent / dancer, you will have other ways of gauging the quality of the teacher and school. However, for those of us who have no experience of dancing and are learning the process along with our children, exam results are one source of information that enable us to compare available schools.

Have read this with interest, as DD is a non-vocational student who takes exams, and is at a school where no lessons (apart from private lessons and 'festival groups') are 'unlabelled' with their level (so there are no specific 'non syllabus' classes). However, on the other hand, it is a wholly ISTD school, so free work is a component of exams at all levels, and it is something that the school takes very seriously. My observation is that the structure of 'ladder of exams' gives a useful 'backbone' to the training, both to the students and to the teaching. The overall average level of exam marks also gives a useful indication of the quality of that training, to those of us who know nothing about dance, because they give an 'outsider's' view of the quality of the dancing. I mean, whether a particular child gets a pass, merit or distinction on a specific day is not really what I'm looking for - but an overall observation that distinctions are very common, merits rarer, and passes unheard of in school A, and that only passes are ever obtained by school B, gives some indication of relative 'rigour', if that makes sense? School B might still fit a specific child much better than school A, but to dance ignoramuses like me, the 'exam profile' is one piece of evidence.

That would be my thought, but I wondered whether I had just been indoctrinated by 'the ISTD way'!

Just a question for nosiness (apologies). DD is at an ISTD school, so has had free enchainements set by the examiner from the very early grades (I don't know about Primary, but certainly from Grade 1 onwards). Within ISTD it seems to be a valued skill - for example the annual ISTD Senior Ballet Awards competition is simply a serious of free enchainements given by the person taking the on-stage 'class', which the competitors then have to perform. The only 'set work' in the competition is the set dance for that grade. As far as I know, free work continues all the way up - haven't got as far as Advanced yet! Given the difference in approach between the RAD and ISTD, is it that the ability to pick up an unknown enchainement given verbally is actually not that important for a dancer, and that ability to perform set routines excellently is more important? I mean, ballet performances are obviously set choreography, learned and performed well?

That's really interesting, Dance*is*life. DD usually has 2 ballet classes 'back to back' with the same teacher - say Grade 6 + pointe, or IF + Intermediate - and often says that they e.g. did more barre work in the first lesson, and more allegro in the second, or whatever. I wonder if it's for the same reasons? Being ISTD, they have done free enchainements from the very earliest grades, Prima, yes, all DD's dancing - including tap, modern, performing groups and stretching, as well as ballet - is all at the same studios, but with a range of different teachers. Essentially they have a tap specialist, and 3 others who teach ballet and MT, visiting teachers for national, singing and drama, and a junior teacher who does stretching and 1:1 for the younger ones.

Prima, sorry, should have said - DD is also 12. No intention of going to vocational school. Her amount of ballet per week is not a lot more than your DD's - 3 hours of 'normal' classes, an hour of pointe-type work, an extra hour last term and next term for exam prep, a 30 min 1:1 lesson which is only sometimes ballet focused - and i can see that it would be hard to find her 'more hours' if she did suddenly decide that auditioning was what she wanted to do. It's tricky.

DD is at an 'all ISTD' school, so i thought I'd post a quick modification to annalieset's response. Although the 'Class Examinations' go up to 8, I don't know anyone who does those, apart from the Primary one, which in DD's school the little ones do before they go on to the Primary exam. My experience is of the 'Graded examinations', whch go up to Grade 6, and are, in DD's school, followed by the Vocational Graded exams. There is some overlap between Grade 6 and Intermediate Foundation - my understanding is that they are of similar standard but the latter has more pointe work. In DD's dance school, it is common for pupils to do one or the other but not both. Typically, those whose strengths lie in genres other than ballet, and those who dance few hours a week, do Grade 6, and those who take their dance reasonably seriously and are likely to go on further in ballet take Interfoundation. Unusually, DD and her cohort took Grade 6 this term and will take IF next term - mainly because they are young to be at this stage and their teacher is careful to increase the amount of pointe work very slowly. In terms of pointe, at DD's school they start pointe and the Interfoundation syllabus after doing Grade 4 - at which point they will be doing a Grade 5 class, a Grade 6 class, an Interfoundation class and a basic pointe class each week in terms of 'just ballet' lessons. So although they don't take the InterFoundation exam until, at the very least, c. a year after Grade 5, they will have been taking the IF classes for around 2 years. Similarly, after DD takes her IF at Christmas, she will attend 1 Advanced class a week, even though that exam is WAY into the future for her.