Street dancers of all ages from a Balloch dance school are set to take part in the street dance world championships next month against crews from all over the world.

The Urbaniks Street Skool of Dance is run by former professional dancers Pauline and Paul Joseph, who both hail from Cardross, teaching around 150 young dancers at the Balloch centre - as well as another 150 at their other centre in Milngavie.

In total, the Urbaniks school will send four teams to the 12th edition of the championships at the SECC at the end of the month, competing in various categories across four days against 10,000 fellow competitors from destinations as far afield as Japan and Canada.

Among the four teams taking part includes an adult team mainly made up of parents of those involved in the younger teams, with the teams required to qualify for the championships by finishing in the top five of the regional qualifiers against teams based across the UK.

The school has already enjoyed major success at the event, including a big year in 2015, when they scooped fifteen world place titles at the event, including becoming world champions in the 'over 16s quads' category.

With the build up to the championships well under way, a week of intensive preparations has already taken place ahead of the big event.

Pauline told the Reporter: "The standard in the competition gets higher and better every year and there is a bit of pressure on us now, especially because of all of the dancers know the standards required of them.

"The competitive dancers will be training at least three times a week and the reality is that most of these dancers want to dance as a profession and so there's a lot of training because we know what it takes to be professional dancers in London and across the world."

The couple met while training at London Contemporary Dance School and then travelled the world with their own dance company, Kultyer Dance Theatre, before deciding to settle down and set up Scotland's first official street dance school, with daughter Honey now taking charge of one of the teams heading to the world championships.

They also continue to work on choreography for TV, theatre shows and festival - as well as being performance captains for the Commonwealth Games opening ceremony in 2014.

Pauline said: "We didn't say we necessarily dance teachers, but it felt like a natural progression as we've always taught and performed and so with four kids, we felt that was the point to stop travelling.

"We started with five people in the class and word of mouth just grew from there. We like to be hands on and we treat the school like a baby to us."

Despite the high pressures of preparations of world championship performances, Pauline was also keen to encourage as many new dancers to come along to the school and learn street dance skills.

She added: "The main reasons to get involved are to keep fit, have fun and be part of something inclusive, as well as learning some cool moves and we teach everybody on the same basis as the world championship dancers."

The Urbaniks school is running an enrolment session for anyone interested in joining between 3pm and 5pm in the Lennox Hall in Jamestown this Friday (August 18).