Strictly classroom

TEACHER Alison Dixon is planning to lead her pupils a merry dance.

That’s her job. To get them up on their feet and dancing. Based at Greenfield School Community and Arts College, in Newton Aycliffe, she’s leading the way in a national schools dance scheme as School Dance Coordinator for Durham County Council.

The Youth Dance England initiative aims to “enhance the profile and quality of dance in our schools”

which makes it sound all very academic although, talking to Alison, her love of dance shines through, as does her belief that it’s capable of making a difference to young people’s lives.

Her career illustrates the variety of dance out there – she trained at the Royal Ballet School, toured the US in Spirit Of The Dance and performed at the Brit Awards with Westlife before turning to teaching.

“All those experiences make you into the teacher you are,” she says.

“They’ve really helped me understand young people and relate to them, and vice versa.”

Injury put Alison out of professional dancing and out of work. She was out of action for 18 months after being injured on the Spirit Of The Dance tour. She became Durham’s school dance coordinator in the spring, one of eight appointed nationwide as part of a two-year trial scheme.

Strange as it seems, dance is generally taught as part of PE and sport.

At an arts college like Greenfield, it has a slightly different role but part of the plan is to take dance out of sport and into arts teaching.

Alison is undertaking an audit of the current dance provision within the 36 schools, including four arts colleges, in her area. They have various degrees of dance activity in their classroom programme.

Her primary aim is to raise the standard of teaching and learning in dance among the 11 to 16-year-olds.

One aim is to increase participation among minority groups in the world of dance, including boys. This builds on the work Alison has been doing at Greenfield over the past eight years, working with both teachers and pupils, including helping those who want to make a living as dancers.

Before the Youth Dance England initiative, she was Greehfield’s head of dance which is quite a rare post in itself, she says. “Dance, in this school, is an integral part of the curriculum and we’re renowned for the quality of teaching of dance. We’ve taken groups of people to schools events and Art Council awards to demonstrate the high quality.”

The idea of moving dance from PE to arts is an appealing one. “It’s good that it’s identified in the creative aspect.

That’s why dance has always had a problem, because it’s classed as PE, sport and dance,” she says.

“There are all the things dance brings to young people, including a creative element. It ticks so many difficult agendas, which is why it’s so important to be in schools and why it’s been such a success really.”

She’d also like to see qualifications available for those who want to take dance further in the profession.

LIKE a lot of little girls, Alison began dancing in her native North-East when she was four.

“But I happened to be quite good at it and that was identified at quite an early age,” she recalls. “I fully expected to have a career as a professional dancer, which was sadly cut short due to an injury.”

She was back home in Durham, living with her parents, when she spotted the advertisement for a dance teacher at Greenfield.

“I said I can’t apply, I haven’t got a degree. I can’t work in mainstream education,” she says. “But my mum persuaded me to put my CV in and the head teacher at the time said to come and talk to him. It went from there. I was teaching full-time here, but did my degree alongside it at Sunderland, which was hard work.”

She might well have decided to teach at a private dance school. They do fantastic work, she says, but in a very different way to how dance istaught in schools.”

Fate comes into the story again because if she’d done that she might never have met her husband Stuart, Greenfield’s PE head. They’re married with a young daughter, Harriet.

For now, Alison is visiting schools building up a pattern of dance teaching in the county. She points to a recent survey among young people that named dance as the second most popular activity, second only to football.

Her experience shows that, although boys present certain problems, most are keen to get on the dance floor. “You still get one or two who say ‘I’m not going to do that’, but you get that in any subject,” she says.

“There are good participation rates, not just in school but the community in Newton Aycliffe. You engage children on all different levels from all different backgrounds.

That’s what we’ve done. It’s worked and been successful.”

So can anyone learn to dance or are some of us destined to have two left feet no matter how many lessons we have? Some find it more difficult than others, she admits. “It depends how it’s taught. You can teach dance, you can teach kids a routine, you can teach them technique. And some really struggle with that.

“But dance in education is all about giving them little tasks and letting them do it their own way.

That’s what engages young people. It gives them an opportunity to be independent, but the skills that go with it are collaboration and team work.

“Quite often dance in a school is misunderstood. What are the benefits?

Some people think all they do is go in that studio and spin around. It’s not that at all.

“There’s fitness, creativity and technique. You’ve still got to win them round and make it something they can relate to. That it’s a skill and they can see the benefits for themselves.”

The success of the BBC’s Strictly Come Dancing is reckoned to have sparked an interest in dancing and Alison feels that dancing is indeed “really starting to have a place in society”.

She adds: “It’s been more exclusive and is becoming more accessible now. People can accept it and enjoy it in different ways to before.”