Work with us: Dance Workshop Leaders for Primary Schools
Dance Workshop Leaders for Primary Schools
Our applications are always open however we will not be processing new applications until Spring 2025.
Every child’s imagination should be inspired by the arts. West End in Schools' mission is to use the skills of the professional theatre to provide highly creative cultural experiences for children which they will remember forever.
Using our experience as an Olivier Award winning production company, we bring together performers, creatives, industry specialists and teaching artists to provide highly creative cultural experiences for children which they will remember forever.
Each year we deliver dance, drama and Shakespeare workshops and perform pantomimes in over 1,000 schools. Our work is primarily with mainstream state schools in communities across the country.
About you
We are always looking for people that reflect our diverse communities, to help us work in new ways and become more relevant to the schools and children we serve. We recognise that this is not yet present in our current workforce, so we particularly welcome and encourage applications from people from diverse backgrounds and life experiences.
We’re looking for brilliant dancers who want to inspire the next generation. You will have an infectious passion and enthusiasm for the arts, and for storytelling.
You will be a working professional dancer or choreographer with a current dance CV. You must have professional credits in any dance practice, or in musical theatre.
You must either have a recent enhanced DBS check or be happy for us to submit you for one.
You will need good time keeping, planning and organisation skills.
You will deliver the workshops on your own so need to be a confident and engaging representative of the company to the Head Teacher and other school staff.
Helpful but not required:
Teaching experience, ideally of school aged children is helpful but is not a requirement. We will consider highly skilled dancers with little teaching experience.
If you can drive that is brilliant - but it is not essential.
About the workshops
Our dance workshops explore the links between dance and storytelling.
In each session you will be leading various games and teaching the children existing choreography to which they can have some input depending on age/ability.
Depending on the number of classes you will be working with, there might be sharing session at the end of the day, where the children perform what they’ve learnt to their peers.
You can read about the content of the workshops and how we describe them to schools on the dance pages of our website.
Typical day as a dance workshop leader
Travel to a school which could be some distance from home - perhaps staying nearby the night before.
Arrive at a school at 8.30am, start teaching at 9am and finish at 3.15pm. There is usually at least an hour break for lunch.
Lead workshops for class groups of approximately 30 children, throughout the day.
For primary school workshops you will be working with children from 4 to 11 years (Reception to Year 6 in England)
Other strands of workshops we offer
In addition to primary school dance workshops we have two other strands of work: drama workshops in primary schools and Shakespeare workshops in secondary schools. These both require strong drama facilitation experience, and are not a good fit for most of our current dancers.
However if you are highly skilled in one of these areas as well please just apply once to your favoured strand (ie dance, primary drama or secondary drama) and note your other areas of expertise on your application. We tend to start new facilitators in one area only so that learning our workshops is more manageable. If we think it would be helpful we will talk to you about other strands of work you’ve indicated during your application process and with your agreement may move your application across.
Pay and terms
Contract: Freelance
Rate of Pay:
Workshops paid at £160 per day or £100 per half day.
We pay you on a weekly basis using a self billing invoice system - ie we write your invoice for you and send you the payment, reimburse your expenses and send a PDF of the self billing invoice every Tuesday.
Training paid at London Living Wage, paid once you first deliver a workshop.
All travel and accommodation expenses are covered from your door to the school, and also to attend training if you are travelling long distances.
Locations: We deliver work in schools across the UK and are looking for facilitators in all regions.
Workshop delivery dates: Workshops are available all year round.
Flexibility for professional auditions booked via your agent: Many of our workshop leaders are dancers in between performing jobs and need to be able to audition. We offer complete flexibility for auditions, and ask that in return you do your best to accept work from us at short notice if we ask you to when someone has withdrawn due to an audition.
How to apply
You are welcome to apply at any point during the year to be a Dance Workshop Leader. We will keep your application on file and will be in touch in Spring 2025 when we are next recruiting, or sooner if work becomes available.
If your application form makes it seem like you would be a good fit for us we will invite you to a paid training day to learn the workshop content and meet our Creative Team. We’ll also explain how everything works and answer any questions you may have.
Workshop leader training dates:
London: Thursday 13 & Friday 14 February 2025
Manchester: Thursday 20 & Friday 21 February 2025
Apply now
Please fill in our application form and the equal opportunities form which will follow it, which is kept separate from your application.