How a good timetable can turn you from a self-employed English teacher into the owner of a school
The Bulletin (Issue 20)
On the flight from London to Tokyo to start our new life as wannabe-eikaiwa-start-up-owner-operators 16 years ago this month, (my wife and I had just bought a slightly worn-out Showa-era house to use as our family home and fledgling English school), I did a back-of-the-napkin calculation: I thought we could (eventually) teach about seven lessons a day, five days a week, with six students per lesson on average to net us 210 students. I knocked back the last of my little bottle of complimentary airplane Bordeaux, wiped my lips with the napkin and promptly nodded off, content that everything would be wine and peanuts forever.
Of course, things didn’t quite work out like that. Here are some of the lessons we have learned along the way about scheduling lessons:
There are busy times of the day, and there are fallow times. Afternoons (after school hours) are the most in demand for kindergarten and elementary school kids, junior high school kids can make it only in early or late evening, high schoolers and business people can only make it in late evenings. Retired folk and housewives are typically available mid-mornings and early afternoons.
Once you know the likely patterns it helps with scheduling. For example, there’s no point in setting up a housewives’ class in the late afternoon — they have to be home dealing with kids and husbands and mealtimes then. Junior high schoolers can’t come right after school as they will likely be in after-school clubs. Business folk can’t make it back from the office until at least 8 o’clock at night, probably later.
Decide whether you want to work weekends or not. If you do, you’ll likely get more business folk and children of single mums and working parents, but remember, as your schedule fills up (it will if you are any good) working six or seven days a week (even if you only do a few lessons on a Sunday, say) gets unsustainable if you have or want to have any kind of family or social life. If you do work weekends, schedule at least one completely-off day during the week.
Be careful of teaching one-to-one lessons at the most popular times. You can and should charge double or triple your group rate for individual lessons, but even so, financially you’d be better off teaching eight teens at 8:30pm than one business person in the same time slot. It’s easier rescheduling one person to a less popular time than a group of eight who can only come in a limited time slot. More thoughts about how much to charge students here.
Avoid having mixed ages in children’s classes. It makes your lessons far more professional and more enjoyable to teach if you have same-year-group lessons set up. You can then use the same textbooks and other materials for the whole class and your teaching and activities can be tailored for that age group, rather than struggling to keep the younger ones entertained and the older ones stimulated. Nip discipline and attention problems in the bud by just setting up year-appropriate lessons. Also, let’s say you have two Year 3 lessons, one on a Monday at 5:00pm and one on Friday at the same time. If a kid misses either class, they can get a replacement lesson in the other class easily at no extra cost in time or money to you.
You may think it’s a good idea to teach four weekly lessons every month, especially when you are starting out with not many scheduled lessons or students. When your lessons begin to fill up, a 48-week work year becomes really hard to maintain and a real headache when you try to set up replacement lessons for folk who quite reasonably want more time off around New Year or the summer holidays.
If you teach fewer lessons a year, as well as having more time off for yourself, you can set up extra-curricular activities like study trips abroad, day camps and school trips, which are fun and can be lucrative. Impossible to do that if you have scheduled lessons almost every week of the year.
Take national holidays off. You, and your students, need time off.
For the longest time I limited my maximum student-per-lesson capacity to six, and that became policy (I thought based on good educational reasons) even when we moved the school out of our house to a rented classroom. But when I thought about the six-person limit, it was because that’s how many kids I could fit around our kitchen table back when we started. It took me years to realise that I could teach a lot more kids at the same time if I just bought another table.
We never did get our student enrollment numbers up to 210 a week, but we have a workable 42-work-week year, I teach in 40-minute lesson slots with 10 minute breaks, that way I can fit in seven lessons between 3:30pm and 10:00pm with one 50-minute dinner break, Monday to Friday. I teach private students in midmorning or midday or in the last lesson of the day, which we find harder to fill with a group. We do occasionally work weekends — to do speech days and Zoom replacement lessons and the like, but I rarely need to. We’re able to operate plenty of extra-curricular activities and I still have time off to travel home to England every year. All thanks to a sensible, sustainable schedule.
How could you shape your schedule to turn your teaching “job” into a business? Leave a comment and share your thoughts with all the subscribers.
I’ll write again next week. All the best,
Patrick
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