Dance Mapping - Arts Council England

The highest percentage of dance courses (47%) run for 4–12 weeks. Again this varies by
region; in the South East 72% of courses run for this period. The North East and Yorkshire
and Humber have a substantial number of courses of varying duration, (48% and 47%
respectively). Across England relatively few dance courses run for between one day and one
week (2%) or between one week and one month (3%)
11. Youth dance
The youth dance sector can be defined as dance activity that takes place with young people
in out-of-school settings and within the informal sector. It does not cover the private sector
dancing schools.
Definition of Youth Dance
YDE defines the sector as follows:
Youth dance activity is usually professionally led, but can be run by skilled volunteers or as
peer led groups. Youth dance activity tends to be in receipt of public funding or supported by
publicly funded organisations such as schools, dance agencies and companies, youth and
community departments, sports and leisure centres or local authorities' arts programmes.
If based within a school it is usually open to young people from other schools.
A Youth Dance Group is a group of young people that meet on a regular basis to create
work for performance. The groups may be open access or selected by geographic location,
age, ability etc.
Youth Dance classes/courses are drop-in, termly or vacation classes and courses in
dance/movement genres or choreography. They may be offered as open access or at
different levels for particular age groups, genders, abilities etc.
Whilst YDE now has a brief to work in schools as a result of the Tony Hall review, this section
of the report continues to refer to the informal sector where dance takes place in out-of-school
settings.
Data on this sector is readily available and up to date as a result of the recent work carried
out by Youth Dance England. The Next Steps/Dance Links project was an extensive national
development project that took place over two years (January 2006–March 2008) working
across the nine English regions. The project was a £1.3 million investment in the area of
dance work. It involved a multi-tiered approach to development at a national level with major
national programmes and projects seeking to support and lead the sector, running alongside
the appointment of nine agencies to manage nine regional projects with a set of prescribed
outputs. The model was an experimental one and highly unique, premised on the notion of
simultaneous regional and national development that would collectively raise the bar for this
burgeoning area of dance practice.
Following from this project and the Tony Hall review, in March 2008, government announced
the allocation of £5.6 million from both the departments for Culture, Media and Sport and for
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