Ya dancer! £1.5m to be spent getting Scots on their feet

Creative Scotland has announced that a major part of a 6.5m fund set up to capitalise on the 2012 Olympics and 2014 Commonwealth Games will be set aside for dance programmes and showcases.

The Get Scotland Dancing initiative has been set up by the Scottish Government to encourage more people to take up healthier activities.

The funding was announced as a new study called for the creation of a major new postgraduate degree course in dance tuition to help increase participation in schools and for more arts venues and theatres to stage dance events for the first time.

The report, compiled by the Federation of Scottish Theatre (FST), claimed that more people in Scotland are now dancing each year than playing football. According to its research, 84 per cent of girls and 38 per cent of boys want to take part in dance at school.

However, leading figures claim dance tuition in schools suffers badly compared with music, literature and art, with only 19 of Scotland's 32 local authorities even employing a dedicated dance officer.

Creative Scotland's chief executive, Andrew Dixon, announced the funding on the back of the launch of the report, which revealed that 19 per cent of the population, or nearly a million people, took part in some kind of dance activity over the last year.

He said: "We'll be launching Get Scotland Dancing formally in the autumn, but it seemed the perfect time to announce the funding we have set aside which groups and companies will be able to bid for.

"It's a joint initiative we'll be running with the Scottish Government and Sportscotland, which is all about getting greater participation in all forms of dance events, and will run right through until the Commonwealth Games in 2014."

Culture secretary Fiona Hyslop said: "We are committed to supporting Scotland's vibrant dance sector and using dance to promote Scottish culture and creativity on the world stage."

The FST's report calls for every council in Scotland to employ a dance development officer, and for specialist dance teaching training to be set up for the first time.

Janet Smith, artistic director of Scottish Dance Theatre, said: "It is a pity that dance as an arts activity has not been part of secondary school education."Scotland has, in general, not discovered and developed the latent dance talent in its young people within their school careers and this has led to a poverty of aspiration and opportunity for Scottish students competing for UK places in higher education.

"There is no MA in dance available anywhere in Scotland, while there are at least 35 postgraduate courses in London and many more available elsewhere in the rest of the UK."

Jon Morgan, director of the FST, said: "Scotland is a nation of dancers in all its forms, but there is so much more we can do to get more people into dance and to maximise dance's contribution to Scotland's cultural and community life."