Innovation Exchange

WHAT IS THE PROBLEM YOU ARE WORKING TO SOLVE?
Dance United proposes a leading role for professional contemporary dance training and performance as an innovative and realistic alternative to custody for young offenders and a transformational pathway for those at serious risk of offending. Dance United seeks to make this work an indispensable part of the portfolio of frontline youth justice and community provision. For the last three years we have been evolving a national action research programme of intensive dance training (‘The Academy’) in joint partnership with NACRO, three regional youth offending teams, three prison establishments and the probation service in West Yorkshire. The model is at a developed stage and the emerging outcomes from our independent research and evaluation programme are sufficiently encouraging that the referral partners are now paying a significant part of the frontline delivery costs. The problem we are currently seeking to address is how to create a viable business and delivery model that can be rolled out much more widely across the country.

HOW ARE YOU GOING TO DO IT?
The Dance United Academy model offers an alternative learning programme designed to engage and reframe the attitudes of young offenders and those at risk of offending through dance in a community-based setting. It is a uniquely intensive intervention informed by a very specific approach and culture. Each 12-week cohort comprises a taster week, followed by a three-week performance project at the end of which a production is presented to invited audiences at professionally staged performances. From the fourth week, participants embark on a differentiated programme of activities that incorporates wider educational outcomes within the dance curriculum. This leads to graduation performances at the end of the cohort. Participants work a 25-hour, five-day week that includes a range of ancillary tasks - from cleaning to cooking - designed to support the dance work and its wider educational objectives. A specially written, QCA approved, Trinity Level 1 ‘stealth’ curriculum is embedded. Drawing on a practice methodology developed from the company’s earlier prison-based work, the primary emphasis of the Academy programme is on quality and excellence. Participants are treated as trainee professional dance artists who must adhere to a number of absolute principles and routines. The fully appointed, purpose-built Academy venue is a seen as vital foundation of the programme. This is an expensive programme and its replication will require not only the establishment of effective consortia at the community level but also much higher-level overall statutory support. Dance United must, in parallel, continue to recruit and develop dance artists and support staff of sufficient calibre to sustain the keynote quality of the work.

WHO WILL BENEFIT?
The Academy currently focuses on those in the NEET age range who are at serious risk of offending; young offenders on intensive community orders, including ISSP, RAP and DTO; and with young people serving prison sentences. As the work is enabled to roll out more widely we believe that there is a great deal of scope for highly specific ‘Academy’ adaptations. For example, we are currently examining a London-based intervention aimed at ‘reluctant gangsters’ – those young people who can see no alternative to being drawn inexorably into the culture of gangs and who are vulnerable to the attendant risks.