How To Schedule Classes

Flexibility is the key focus when thinking about your class scheduling. Offering a flexible timetable is an important aspect of student service by making it easy for new people to join and your existing students to stay. Regardless of who you are or what you offer, one of the most important factors for any parent considering enrolling their child in your program is how convenient the class times are! Getting your class schedule right will lead to greater retention and ultimately your schools long term growth, by allowing your students/parents to work your classes around their regular activities.

Demands on peoples lives are always changing due to work and family commitments. The more options you provide to attend classes the more likely they are to work them around their busy and hectic lifestyles.

By having a flexible timetable will also ensure students can make up any classes they miss, which keeps them progressing and helps to keep a high active count.

Depending on where you are at with your schools progress will determine how you structure your timetable, a new school with lots of white belts has little need for a brown and black belt class. Equally a more established school will need to offer classes for all ages and grades.

You can start your classes 20-30 minutes after school finishes, this time is often best utilised for 4-6 years olds.

Here are some key points to consider:

• Offer the same class at different times on different days i.e Monday 4.30pm and Tuesday 6pm.
• Teach adults and children separately they have different needs.
• Teach no more than 3 belt grades in each class i.e beginner/intermediate/advanced. In a mixed grade class beginners can get overwhelmed and advanced students under challenged.
• The length of classes - 30 mins for 4-6 year olds, 45 minutes for other age groups with maybe 1 hour for advanced students.
• Separate your curriculum to A & B days. For example: Monday's teach part of the curriculum such as kata's and padwork and Wednesday's teach the other part self defence and combinations. This way you are not covering the same material on both days encouraging students not to miss a class.
• Don't wait for a class to get too large to split it, chances are it will never get to the that stage, splitting a class of 25 into two classes of 12 with less belt ranks will increase your retention and allow those two classes to grow to into 3 classes.
• If you a one man band allow 5-10 minutes between classes to give you time to deal with other elements of running your school such as speaking to parents taking retail orders, remember its about customer service!
• When a new student joins allocate classes for them, so they view it like an appointment, it becomes more important. Also you don't want to have 10 students in one class with 30 the next day!
• Don't allow new students to train as many times as they want, beginners often start with a massive amount of enthusiasm but all too often burn out quickly.
• Offer a good student to Instructor teaching ratio - 1:10

Think about your schedule carefully. Your school will only grow as much as your schedule allows.

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Lee Mainprize