trinity music exams- how many years to prepare for different grades?

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Hi
DD is nearly 14 in yr 9. She started doing guitar lessons at school at 8 (4 kids per group) and when she went to secondary she started 1:1 lessons at school, I pay about £190 /term. She is very talented and loves playing, at the end of her first year at secondary she was entered to do grade 3 and got a distinction, she hadn't done grades before. Last year in year 8 she wasn't entered to do an exam. This morning I told her to ask her teacher today about when the next exam would be. He told her she would do grade 4 at Easter.

That means it will have taken her nearly 2 years of 1:1 lessons to move from grade 3 to grade 4.Isn't that too long? I do wonder if the lessons were not at school whether the teacher would have taken a bit more interest and put her up for grade 4 last year and then grade 5 this year. Any thoughts?

Depends on how much she practices, and how effective that practice is. Can she play all the technical requirements? What is her sight reading and aural like?
The syllabus is available on line at the Trinity website www.trinitycollege.co.uk
so you can see what she has to do for each grade.

I'd have expected her to be doing Grade 5, after that length of 1-1 lessons, (and expensive ones, I pay less than that per year for school 1-1 25 min lessons). Mine have tended to move at a minimum of a Grade a year, sometimes more. No guitar here, but piano, bowed strings, woodwind and brass.

Average progression is a grade a year but there are many more things to explore in music making than sittings exams. What else has the teacher covered with your DD? Have they been exploring paying by ear or improvisation instead of exam work? Is there any theory work? Have you had any feedback from him from the lessons e.g. notebook with comments, termly reports etc? Has he discussed what he's intending to cover with her? Having lessons in schools can be problematic as you can't talk to face to face with the teacher. I am a music teacher and teach both in schools and privately, but communicate with school pupils through a lesson diary and the parents also have my email address/phone number if they want to talk through any points.

If the teacher has been working on developing aspects such as improvisation, composing and general musicality (including aural ability) then it wouldn't be such a bad thing to delay an exam for a while. But if you don't know what they've been working on, it might be hard to say.

I'm assuming your DD practises as you say she loves playing. But does she practise the right things? Sometimes children like to practise things they can already do and avoid tackling aspects of technique that they find difficult. I think you need to speak to the teacher yourself and have a discussion about his plans for your DD's future progression.

Thanks for your comments, very useful.

She loves the teacher and loves the lessons and she has been improvising/ doing probably more exciting stuff than just working towards an exam. Which is great but there is a place for mores serious work, I think. I'm very happy that she loves to play and to us she sounds good, but then again, dh and I have no musical training whatsoever. She must be good though, she auditioned for the school band and got in and she did get a distinction for grade 3.

I'm not exam obsessed but these lessons are a lot of money and I know that these exams will look good when she applies for uni etc so I am keen that she does them. I still feel that in 2 years of 1:1 she should have done 2 grade exams as the ability is there. But yes, the problem is that I've never even met the teacher and he doesn't write on her book, ever! Could I ask him to do this?

Shelling...you make an excellent point about her practising what she likes to play, I hadn't thought of that. At least now with the exam she'll have to practise stuff she probably otherwise wouldn't choose. I've ordered the grade 4 book from amazon so let's see how she gets on.
Aural? I don't know what that is, I'll look at the trinity website

sorry forgot...Raspberry, you pay less than £190 per year for 1:1 lessons? Am I being ripped off? She goes to a state school so these lessons are provided by the council

I pay £7.00 a lesson. I've just done the Maths and realised I've exaggerated slightly! It works out at slightly more than £190, they were £5.50 when DS1 started so less then. They aim for 34 lessons a year but is usually around 30 in the end. You can learn up to 3 instruments including voice.

It is a state school but they don't use the County Music Service teachers, hiring their own extremely good staff instead, who also run some great extra-curricular groups.

They will teach in twos sometimes if it is appropriate.

When I was looking at secondary schools our catchment secondary would have charged £15 for an individual lesson or £7.50 for a group one - this was 5 years ago. On the other hand they will provide a free instrumental lesson if you do GCSE music which the DCs doesn't.

Just to be clear, my DCs don't just race from grade to grade - they often skip grades and they certainly don't just learn exam pieces.

Some teachers like to enter students for an exam below their capability so they are very secure - is it possible that your DDS teacher may be doing that?

From a uni point of view, you currently get points from Grade 6 onwards.

I wonder whether maybe the school should hire their own music teachers and maybe it could workout a bit cheaper.

But I don't want to knock her teacher, dd is playing very well and loves these lessons, she says her teacher is brilliant . But the communication between teacher and parent is non-existent which is where the problem lies really. And yes, maybe it is better that she does grade 4 and does well rather than attempt grade 5 and scrape through

School obviously subsidizes the costs as well.

It does seem an awfully long time between grades.

My own DD did Grade 3 last Easter and then spent the last term of primary school playing fun stuff and the whole of the Summer barely playing at all.

Now she has a new teacher who's straight into Grade 4 pieces and planning on putting her in for the exam next Easter. So she'll have worked for 2 terms before taking the exam.

I'd try and get some feedback from your DD's teacher. We've had no notebook back and forth as we did at primary school so i'm just wondering what her report will be at Christmas.

I've had no feedback whatsoever from the teacher and it seems to me they play lots of fun stuff, that's probably why dd loves the lessons so much.
Anyway, I've worked out that t go from grade 3 to grade 4 it will have cost us over £1000 and 2 years. Awful!!!! I wish I'd been more on the ball and asked for him to be entered last year. If I hadn't asked this year I'm sure she wouldn't have been entered, but I'm quite annoyed with dd as I reckon she gave him the impression that she wasn't interested in exams....she won't admit to this but I do wonder. Any music teachers out there...if your pupil said she didn't want to do the exam, what would you do? Would you ask the parents their opinion or would you just accept the child's opinion?

But the point isn't really whether you do an exam or not, its about the progress. DS2 did Grade 3 trombone last year, is now doing lots of different stuff and is likely to do Grade 5 next June or autumn. So although he won't do Grade 4, his teacher will still be progressing him further, but in an indirect way.

Exams are useful benchmarks along the way, but teachers shouldn't only be teaching to each test

Hard to tell, really. I have paid a fair amount of money for music lessons in school (1:4 lessons) and out (1:1) over the last few years. DS is about to take his first ever exam - Grade 5 - and may not take another unless he wants to do Grade 8 at some very far future point. DD, who does many dance exams, is adamant that she doesn't want to do music exams.

However, both love playing. DS plays at least 5x a week in different groups - orchestra, wind group, county jazz etc etc - and plays a lot in concerts, which he loves. DD just loves tootling along in her own sweet way.

If I looked at it as '£ per exam', it's a LOT of money for 1, at the most 2, exams in a musical lifetime. If I look at it as '£ per hour of enjoyment', it's dirt cheap.