Music and Dance Schools: Affordable Access

Lord Hall of Birkenhead Excerpts

Thursday 16th October 2025 Grand Committee

[Lord Hall of Birkenhead (CB)]

I shall speak in favour of another part of the MDS scheme: the role played by the centres of advanced training, the CATs. These provide specialist training in music or dance for talented 10 to 18 year-olds, while allowing them to stay at home and attend their regular schools. When I chaired the Music and Dance Advisory Board in the noughties, a long time ago, this was a scheme that we all wanted to cherish. What could be better than finding talent wherever it might be, supporting it, nurturing it and giving financial support to those who otherwise would never conceive of having a life in music or dance? That is what these centres—the CATs—do.

However, for that to work, you need long-term commitment. It is difficult to run anything involving people’s lives as this does—young lives—when you are living from year to year not knowing where the money is going to come from. The support that they need to grow is measured over years, not the short-term cycles that we all work on. I also think that commitment should include—and indeed increase—going out there, working in schools and looking for talented children. I myself have seen the inspiration that can come from a dancer or a musician working up close with children in schools.

This morning I had an inspiring chat with an alumnus of a CAT about just that. Reece McMahon grew up in York in a single-parent household on a council estate with no car. For him, it was the Northern School of Contemporary Dance coming into the classroom in his secondary school that lit the spark. As he said to me:

“That visit genuinely opened up the rest of my life”


and

“It gave me confidence”.


That is why CATs cannot be passive, waiting for people to come to them. They have to create those transformative moments and be funded to do so. Reece, by the way, now runs Chisenhale Dance Space. I think he is the youngest dance leader in the UK. He is passionate about giving opportunities to others, opening up doors, however difficult the funding landscape is. As he and I were agreeing, it is not that we lack evidence—we know this works. Over more than two decades it has been finding and producing some really talented people. Let us keep on opening those doors.