The teachers

Why everyone here teaches, and nobody only administers

Marisol founded this school and still teaches every ballet class above the first level, six days a week. Grace, Danny, Elena, Priya and Jonah are the same: each of them carries a full week of classes rather than a title. The reason is arithmetic rather than philosophy — a school of six people cannot afford a person whose job is only to manage the others, and pretending otherwise would be the kind of detail a parent notices the first time they ask a question and are handed to somebody who was not in the room. When the office answers the telephone during the day, that is also one of these six people; between four and eight in the evening, when every one of them is teaching, a message waits until the following morning rather than being answered by somebody who was not there to see the class.

No letters after any name

Not one certificate, examination-board registration, association membership or award appears anywhere on this page or on any of the six pages behind it. That is deliberate, and here the reason is blunt: this is a demonstration for a school that does not exist, so any qualification listed for these six people would be an invented one, and an invented credential is a worse lie than an invented school.

On a real school's website this rule inverts, and it should. Anybody can hang a sign that says dance school, and a parent standing in a corridor for the first time has almost no way to tell a careful teacher from a careless one. A real school in this trade ought to say plainly what its teachers have actually trained in and what checks they hold — a background check for anybody working with children, first-aid training, whatever is true — because that is the strongest signal available to a family who cannot otherwise judge what they are watching through a window. What it must never do is claim a body, a syllabus or a qualification that is not real.

No examination board is named anywhere on this site. This school is not presented as registered with any dance or music examination board, our class levels are our own, and no student here is entered for a named board's examination.

We publish no alumni list and no success rate. We publish no alumni list, no placement rate and no success percentage, because a neighbourhood school's honest claim is about the years a student spends here rather than about where a few of them ended up.

What is here instead

What each of these six people has actually done, and for how long, and what a class taught by them is actually like — which is the only thing a parent can use, and it is what most families ask about anyway once the telephone call gets past the fees.