Her books have been nominated for a number of prizes including the Booktrust Early Years Award (2010), The Roald Dahl Funny Prize (2010, 2012), The Waterstones Children’s Book Prize (2011, 2013), Oscar’s Book Prize (2015), and The Dundee Picture Book Award (2019). The book also has a great representation of different people (race, size, hair colour) and male single parent (presumably). This book could be used for lessons on inclusivity, theme, and figurative language (personification). I am using it as part of the 'No Outsiders: Everyone Included, Everyone Welcome' project that our school is taking part in. Biff goes onto sneak into the theatre and shocks everyone with his talent showing them what he can do.

This book subtly introduces gender stereotypes and would be a really good opener for a lesson about stereotypes and for children to discuss why dogs can’t do ballet, or why woman can’t be firefighters or why men can’t be nurses etc etc. He sneaks to ballet lessons and ultimately to a performance at the Royal Theatre, where he or she, does indeed show that dogs do do ballet! The story is nonsensical, and like her other work ‘The Worst Princess’ it (perhaps more subtly) suggests that you don’t have to be what you are ‘supposed’ to be. Each evening she goes, she know her dog wants to come but Dad always says no 'Dogs don't do ballet'. Despite the fact that the focus of the story is actually a male dog and you never find out the girl narrator's name it's a lovely story that promotes inclusion and acceptance.His owner - a young girl - recognises his love for ballet and tries to bring him along to different ballet events.

However, at the Royal Ballet when one of the dancers falls, Biff steps in and receives a lot of praise for his ballet. When I take it out she screams excitedly and crawls quickly to my lap, and other times she brings it to me. Her work has also been adapted for television (Bookaboo, CBeebies), puppetry (Little Angel), dance (Ballet Black), orchestra (LSO) and theatre (New Writing North, Little Blue Monster).The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products.