The Benefits of Dance
Dance helps schools achieve beyond the National Curriculum
It lends itself to a variety of cross-curricular learning strategies, and can contribute to your school achieving more than the PE national curriculum requirements, for example dance can contribute to the following initiatives:
- The five outcomes of Every Child Matters [link], and Every Disabled Child Matters [link]
- Four aims and core themes of the National Healthy Schools Programme [link]
- Extended schools [pdf]
- Obesity strategy [link]
- The ten pupil outcomes of high quality dance (Dance Links) [Dance Links brochure]
- ArtsMark [link] and SportsMark [link]
Other benefits include:
- Creative thinking: Children and young people are oozing with creative and inspired ideas. Dance is one way for them to channel these ideas towards creating something brilliant.
- Development of early motor skills: particularly relevant to early years and primary.
- Health and wellbeing: Dance can help children and young people stay fit, healthy and active, encourage self-esteem, vision, ambition and social inclusion.
- Individual diversity: Our classes and workshops facilitate a creative process in a safe environment for movement exploration, whilst maintaining an appreciation and respect for everyone’s individual diversity and values.
- Critical thinking and evaluation skills: An important part of the dance composition process is using basic critical thinking skills (self and peer evaluation) to evaluate their compositions and improve their own work. This is usually facilitated as a class discussion with video playback.
- Leading and team working skills
