The Academy offers a radically intensive, dance-led learning programme for young offenders and young people at risk of offending in a community setting. The evidence collected over the first two years of its operation suggests that the Academy programme makes a major positive impact on participants’attitudes and behaviour.

This evidence indicates that Academy participants are less likely to re-offend than their peers and that on completion of the programme they have much higher than expected rates of transfer into education, training and employment. These ‘hard’ outcomes are underpinned by measurable increases in participants’ capacity to learn and the development of a range o fkey life skills, to which dance as a process and a context is crucial.

Set against recent claims that the government’s ten year youth crime drive has had ‘no measurable impact’ (Solomon and Garside 2008: 36), the outcomes of the programme to date suggest that it is high time policymakers recognised the serious role that professionally appointed and properly targeted arts interventions can play in helping to address the problem of youth offending.