The same hour every week: a music school’s timetable
Ask a music school what its timetable looks like and you get a grid: Monday, piano room, 16:00, the same pupil for three years. The grid is the business. Everything that breaks it costs money.
What breaks it is rarely the pupil. It is two teachers booked into the one room with the good piano, a forty-five-minute lesson charged as an hour, and a recital organised in a group chat. Each of those is a setting, not a habit.
Rooms and instruments are booked, not assumed
Add each room — and each instrument you only have one of — as a resource, and link each lesson to the rooms it can use. A lesson then takes a teacher and a room together, and a time is offered only when both are free. Nobody discovers at 16:00 that the drum room is taken.
The weekly lesson, set once
Each pupil’s lesson is a standing booking set at the desk — weekly or fortnightly — and every lesson lands in the diary with a reminder before it. A holiday week is reported, not forced, and moving one lesson moves only that one.
Hour packs, counted in minutes
Many schools sell hours, not lessons, because pupils switch between forty-five, sixty and ninety minutes. A pack of hours counts down by the minute: a ninety-minute lesson takes ninety, a forty-five takes forty-five, and the balance on the pupil’s card is exact.
Sell hours if your lessons change length. Count them in minutes, and the arguments about “that was only forty-five” disappear.
- A resource for each room and each one-of-a-kind instrument.
- A standing booking for each pupil’s weekly lesson.
- An hour pack that counts minutes, and a lesson given back to it when you accept a missed week.
The recital as a group session
The spring recital is a group session with its seats, shown live on the booking page; families book their places from the link, and the reminder goes to every one of them.
Group lessons for a term
A group has its own timetable: its lessons open ahead, each pupil is enrolled once for the term with a seat in every lesson, and the register at each lesson counts the pack down. One-to-one teaching — most of a music school — runs on standing bookings, as above.