ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with a short review of the position of dance within contemporary primary education. This looks at the placement of dance in the National Curriculum, and examines the development and changes that have occurred within the dance documentation since the introduction of the National Curriculum. At this point, several studies which provide information on how schools and teachers are coping with the implementation of the National Curriculum are considered briefly. In the second section of the chapter, there is a selection of personal accounts of the teaching of dance taken from interviews with a number of practising primary school teachers. These provide some interesting perspectives on the teaching of dance, both before and after the introduction of the National Curriculum. The information provided by these ‘voices from the classroom’ is then discussed in the final section, which — whilst acknowledging the inevitable limitations of such a small-scale study — nevertheless attempts to draw some tentative conclusions about the current position of dance within the primary school and offer some thoughts for the future.
