I've just started up setting up a website and advertise on musicteachers.co.uk but would like to gain more pupils!

Just set up in a new village and have got one clarinet pupil but really would like to make teaching a full time occupation.

1. Can I contact schools to advertise with or go in?
2. I was thinking of offering a 10 week "introduction to music" course, introducing clarinet, flute and theory to children or adults, not sure how to arrange this though.
3. There are quite a few church events / W.I. sort of stuff round here - is it worth doing a talk?

General ideas / help would be much appreciated, I don't want to waste lots of money on lost avenues and not find places that bring pupils and are free!

Thanks in advance

A card in the village post office or newsagent would probably only cost a very small amount.

Tell your one pupil that you are looking for more pupils - give them some cards to give out - word of mouth is the best advertising.

If you want to work in schools, you will probably have to go through your local music service. However private schools make their own arrangements, so it would be worth contacting the head of music of any local independent schools directly.

You could generate your own flyers and leave some in your local library / church hall etc

Make up your own flyers and stand outside school gates at going home time handing
the flyers out to all and sundry!

Go to your local music shop and put your name on their teachers list.

Gumtree!

Post flyers through doors.

Have car magnets made up by vistaprint.co.uk

Give a concert!

If all is lost, pray!

Contact schools and offer them a free lesson as a raffle prize.

School fetes sometimes have a programme that they sell ads in for a few pounds.

I would certainly say arrange some short concerts in various churches or other places and have some leaflets available for people to take away. Don't bother giving a talk. I've always found that to be a waste of time. People don't wan't to hear someone talking about music, they want to hear the music itself!

schoolofeverything.com

Thankyou for all your suggestions, I'll write them down and tick them off when tried!

Has anyone tried something like a "10 week starter course" before and did it work?

OK - made suggestion then realised it had already been made - brain not engaged today

I'm going to get on with designing some flyers today

Things have been going slowly with this as I've another business to run but luckily that should be almost running itself in a couple of months.

I've just finished my flyers today

Just got to start using 'em now!

Get them well scattered across the area, Nicia. Subtlety doesn't really work here, I feel. All the best!

Thankyou Barry

I'm quite excited to see what (if anything, lol) happens

Silly question but how would I go about doing this? Can I just contact said church saying I'm a clarinettist etc?

Yep Do some research as to which churches in your area do recitals and have good pianos for your accompanist to work with, and go from there. A number of London area churches do lunchtime recitals, and I suspect you'll find some churches in your patch will do similar things.

School of everything has worked got a new pupil from it

Maybe I haven't got the knack, and have never used School of Everything before, but on reading about it here, I just did a search on piano and classical Greek in my London postcode (the 2 things I am currently learning) and pages & pages of all sorts of irrelevant stuff came up. I think I may have found an EVEN WORSE search engine than the ABRSM's - and that takes a bit of doing!

PatC

PS Best wishes for setting up your teaching business PixiePorsche!

Thankyou Pat

I've got two pupils now - really could do with finding more.

Anyone know how to get involved with home ed pupils?

Find out where your local home ed groups meet up - it's usually at libraries or other public buildings. There will be a Yahoo group or something similar for local home edders if there are many in your area. All you need is one home ed student then if all goes well, word of mouth will bring in lots more.

Also send your CV in to all the local schools to see if there are any peripatetic vacancies.

The 10-week-course option sounds like a good idea. If you could get a local newspaper or Families magazine to feature this, it would be great publicity.

I have a home ed mum starting lessons with me

Just in the process of emailing local schools at the moment.

I'll look into the 10 week course!

From my experience of my local primary & secondary schools, they are often pretty rubbish at checking or responding to emails. Best to call and get the name of the Head of Music and then send in an old-fashioned paper CV.

Have you done a letterbox drop with your flyers? I did that at the start of this year and got 7 new students after distributing about 300 leaflets. They have definitely paid for themselves, and I will be doing another drop soon!

I'm just picking up this thread from last year to say that, having had very few new pupils in the last couple of years, I've recently started 3 new ones and am doing 2 more introductory lessons next Friday. All these young people are at the same school and have all contacted me because the mother of the first one told the other mums how happy her daughter was to be coming to me and how much she was enjoying playing again. So word of mouth really does work!

A year ago I was in a similar position and spent alot on shop window advertising but only got 1 pupil this way (and that was from a free board) - start the shop window thing slowly and if it isn't delivering for you stop.

Most of my pupils came from personal recommendation - I'm friends with several local piano teachers and so got a few that way - and I had business cards printed with Vistaprint and asked music shops to take them - I had several enquiries this way too.

I wrote to loads of schools, colleges and libraries - nothing doing there - I think the schools are too worried about child protection to recommend anyone who isn't in their system.

I'd try a variety of methods - don't spend a fortune on anything that isn't working, and once you have a few pupils, personal recommendation takes over anyway. Good luck!

I also wrote to every secondary school in the area a few years ago, but this didn't seem bring me any pupils. Fortunately, I've had a healthy number of pupils on my books since I moved here 9 years ago and very few have left. But as I said, only a few new ones have started in the last few years, so this sudden interest is very welcome and I'll struggle to fit in any more soon, which is a nice problem to have!

I too wrote to all the local schools when we moved two years ago; like others, there was no response and I wouldn't bother again.

Having had a very lean period, things seem to have started to pick up. I've taken on five new pupils in the past couple of months and have another two trial lessons booked. It's very hit and miss - you can go for months and months with not a single enquiry, then like buses, they all come at once.

All the enquiries I've had recently have come via Google/my website. I hardly get any now from any listings sites. I've also tried delivering flyers and putting cards in shop windows, but nothing from any of those.

One year I did a a whole heap of flyers and got absolutely zero response.

Word of mouth works best but with only two pupils it's not going to be a sure fire thing.

But the other thing that worked really well for me was that I volunteered to help out at the local primary school, two hours a week, and 'teach' recorder and general music and whatever.
I did it for free of course but word obviously then got round that I was a music teacher, the kids (most of them anyway) liked me, I pushed the piano bit and did a 'hard-sales' job on a couple of the more able and interested pupils and things took off form there.
(Of course, there was one particularly awful school concert that probably did me more harm than good but you can;t win it all).
If you're not allowed to help out at schools for free now (EU regs and whatever), could you offer to do some music session at the local Brownies thing, or any youth club or Sunday school session ?
Anything just to get your name and face out there . . .

I suspect that the CRB issue makes this sort of thing a lot less doable these days.

Yes, I'd thought that might be the case but if you do it under the 'supervision' of the adult who's qualified to be there, isn;t that fine ? i.e. if the Brown Owl invites you to do a music session while she looks on, isn't that OK ?

Think about offering gift voucher type introduction to music - I have had a few successes with offering 6lessons for the price of 5 as a gift voucher, admittedly to people I have been recommended to by current pupils but it might be another option to consider.
When I first started I put up business cards wherever I saw a shop with a business card board and I soon had lots of interest.
Good luck

Just wanted to say that I am already an established teacher and have been teaching for over 40 years. My reason for bringing back this thread was to say how word of mouth has really worked for me just recently, after a pupil played in a school concert and the improvement she'd made since their last concert was remarked on. Her mother was asked who was teaching her and now I have several new pupils.