Making Dance Training More Inclusive

As part of a bigger conversation, today, One Dance UK launched their report on the barriers disabled dancers face in the dance industry. Members of NYB and Parable Dance are excited to be joining them for their presentation. You can read more about it here.

At NYB, we are committed to making ballet accessible to everyone.

As part of that commitment, we’ve created a new report in collaboration with members of the NYB All In! Steering Group, as well as other young people with lived experience of disability and access barriers. The report highlights the challenges they’ve faced in accessing ballet training and shares their ideas for making it more inclusive.

The research aimed to explore the question:

“How can ballet be taught in a more inclusive way at pre-vocational and vocational level?”

We listened to their voices and focused on sharing their ideas and suggestions for how training can be more inclusive.

The report includes their feedback and outlines areas where change is needed—such as improving access to spaces, offering more flexible training routes, and better supporting communication needs.

It also shares practical recommendations for schools and organisations on how to make early-stage dance training more accessible.

We will use this report to shape our practice and hope our report helps schools and organisations better support young disabled dancers right from the start of their journey. We will also be sharing our learning through Continued Professional Development. Please email: jo.meredith@nationalyouthballet.org if you would like to find out more about our training opportunities.

“We gathered a group of young disabled dance artists to explore how we could make our work—and that of training courses—more accessible. We hope this report will be useful to young dancers and schools alike.”
— Jo Meredith, NYB Creative Director

We are very grateful to Natalie Haslam (NYB Project Manager for Inclusion and Outreach), who compiled this report.

📄 Read our full report: NYB Pre-vocational and Vocational Ballet Report

🔊 Audio version available

Photo (c) NYB