The Dance City Board of Trustees has taken the difficult decision to teach out our BA (Hons) Professional Dance programme and close the programme to applicants with immediate effect; no students will join in September 2025. All current students will be able to continue with our high-quality provision, with the final cohort completing their studies in summer 2026. 

Undergraduate dance programmes and departments across the country are struggling to recruit students, and have been closing at an alarmingly fast rate. A considerable long-term decline in the number of students taking GCSE and A Level Dance and BTEC Performing Arts programmes nationally has restricted the pipeline of applicants. Like many providers of higher education in the performing arts, we are faced with further challenges associated with the capping of student fees, a reduced pool of students after Brexit, and substantially increased costs related to the delivery of the provision. 

We have worked incredibly hard to restructure the programme, diversify it, and recruit students, but we must now reflect on how Dance City can best serve its overall charitable object of education in a way that remains sustainable for the future. 

We recognise we must protect the future of dance education and will turn our attention to how we can be a catalyst and instigator for dance education across the region, in and out of schools and, crucially, rebuild the pipeline, so many more people, especially young people, can make an informed choice to study dance at undergraduate level and beyond.  

We would like to thank the University of Sunderland for its committed and supportive approach for many years and the many cohorts of students and alumni for the years of knowledge exchange and creative collaboration through training in and studying dance at Dance City. We also thank our dedicated staff, present and past, for their enormous efforts to weather the winds of the rapid changes in the higher education landscape, and the many collaborators for their unwavering contributions to the creative education of our future workforce. 

Arts education will be a key driver for growth of the creative sector; Dance City will continue to  support the rich ecology of dance education, particularly its potential to enrich dance as an artform and as a social practice. 

Anand Bhatt, CEO/Artistic Director, Dance City