Sound Step Music School

[Creole]

Anyone heard of them? What do you make of them?

{http://www.soundstepsmusic.co.uk\Sound Step Music School}

Sorry link below.

Sound Step Music School

Three of my friends go to this with their children and they can't praise it enough. Their children all love it and the mums say both the children and the parents are learning! (Parents are encouraged to stay and sit behind their child to encourage/help them)

The only slight criticism one mum had to make was that you seem to be expected to pay for new books or for medals/certificates fairly often.

The only other thing would be that since it's a franchise, the teaching staff obviously depend on where you live. The same people cover a few towns around where I live, so my friends all get the same staff, and thus all seem happy with it.

Here, they always offer a free trial lesson, so if you're at all interested, that might be the best thing to do. They also seem quite flexible, so one of my friends had to take a place in the next town because our town was full, but she's now top of the waiting list when a space is free here. Another friend was going to have to miss 3 lessons in a row because her family was away several weekends, so they offered her the chance to go to another session a few miles away for those weeks at a time that suited.

Thanks for that, at 7.90 an hour it seems really good.

How are their kids progressing though? Apparently, they teach them to read and write music as well.

From what I can gather, the children are progressing well. One boy I know has been going a couple of terms and is now starting to do both hands together. That's from being a total beginner.

I think the reading music bit is done through lots of whole-group games and activities, one of my friends said she has learnt a lot!

I can't remember what the price is here, but I do know it started off at what seemed a really good price (might even be your £7.90 an hour), but fairly quickly went up a few pounds. Still cheaper than private keyboard lessons, but I think a few parents were a bit miffed the lower price didn't last long.

DS1 did this for a few years. There seemed to be quite a few disruption problems (the teachers were usually music students with no great skill at crowd control) and about half the lesson was spent on games (which you may feel makes the cost per hour rather less reasonable). He made considerably more progress when he moved on to individual private lessons.

DS is in his second term atm.
I think the teaching is structured quite well, especially the way they teach reading the dots (but i am no expert - have nothing to compare).
BUT the group teaching does mean that each child is sitting waiting for the teacher to get round the whole class (10 kids) individually, and they are supposed to 'practice' while they wait but of course they fiddle with their keyboards and it is all the most horrible cacophony. If DS shows signs of enjoying playing per se (he does) then I think we will switch to private lessons.