Vicky is an experienced Specialist Safeguarding and Social Care Trainer. With over 15 years of experience, she has worked with various sectors, including education, social care, and emergency services. Vicky currently serves as a safeguarding consultant for the dance industry, offering training and support to improve safeguarding practices in over 400 dance schools across the UK. She is also a qualified dance teacher and school owner.
Messaging is important.
What we teach young dancers about their own safety is vital as this is what stays with them as they enter the professional world and start their careers.
Young dancers receive messages about what dance is like from many sources and not all of them are accurate or helpful. For example, when I was young many of the story books and magazines would talk about young dancers who would “do anything to achieve their dreams” and who wanted “success at all costs”. As a safeguarding specialist, I am sure you can all see why this seem like a dangerous message to me.
Whereas, I wish these notions have long left children’s bookshelves as teachers we can still see the impact of these messages all around us. The occasions where young dancers have been given dangerously romanticised notions of what it takes to achieve. Ideas that can put them at risk and ideas that have, over generations become so engrained in our culture they can be hard to change.
These messages now come at young dancers from all directions, from unrealistic expectations and dangerous training methods championed on social media through to parents and grandparents who may have had personal experience of training methods we would now consider unsafe both physically and emotionally.
As teachers it has become essential that we not only teach our young dancers how to dance but that we talk to them about standards and safety. In 5 years’, time if one of your young dancers is spoken to in a disparaging and belittling way at audition do you want them to think this is “just how dance is, I need to learn to take it” or do you want them to think “I’m worth more than that and this is not ok”.
Making a cultural change to a profession takes us all and takes a lifetime but the difference it can make to future lives is immeasurable. We can start to make this change by actively challenging the poor messaging our dancers are exposed to and helping them to expect more for their own safety and own futures. In a time where children are bombarded with messaging from social media, influencers and marketing strategies it is more important than ever that as teachers we role model safety and wellbeing in dance.
