Missing school lessons for music lessons

[redskybynight]

DS learns an instrument at school. The way the music lesson timetable works it is that they have a rotating 4 week timetable so that a child will miss (part of) 4 different school lessons, so any given lesson only every 4 weeks.

Unfortunately DS's timetable actually has him missing different lessons of the same subject (English) for 3 of his 4 lessons, so he's missing some of an English lesson practically every week. He is taught by a teacher who is also a music teacher at the school (i.e. not a peri teacher primarily) so we suspect (as he only gives instrumental lessons to 3 children, timetabled as 3 music lessons in a single school lesson of an hour) that there is nowhere else to move DS's music lesson to.

So I am wondering how "bad" it is to be missing school lessons for music? Both in DS's scenario (where he's missing a single subject a lot) and in general (however it was timetabled he would miss something). DS is struggling already with missing class, as both of his lessons so far he missed finding out the homework as he wasn't there and he's not yet organised enough to have managed to find out the homework from a classmate. We potentially have a option to move him to lessons after school, which will be logistically more complicated but wondering if it is worth it ...

DS has just moved into Y7 so this is new to us ...

Same as ifonly4. I am not sure if all schools have a 'it's all about the school attitude', many scholarship applications have no issue with piano being the secondary instrument with some requiring piano to be taken up in senior to assist with composition/wider work later down the line.

The normal requirement is that a child can contribute to the wider music life in addition to developing their own instrumental skills. Choir, ensembles, section and full orchestra etc.

However OP, I would definitely look at some re-working on your son's timetable if the same subject is being clashed, this is not the same as playing catch up on missed lessons if they rotate by week.

DS was offered to do GCSE music even though he doesn't play an instrument.

DD has managed fine with music lessons during regular school day. I agree it takes a lot of organisation. My main problem is DD can easily miss her lesson, having forget her lesson is on & I don't want to pay for nothing.

I think unless they are set on being musicians lessons are better outside school.
Sometimes the lessons aren't that good anyway and lots of these companies who go into schools don't use very good teachers and the lessons are second rate.
A private lesson is much better, especially if you find good well recommended teachers with lots of experience.
The county music service seem to in general have good teachers though and the odd missed academic lesson won't hurt them.
I would contact the school and ask for a change of time table as they can't miss the same lesson every week. If this isn't possible I'd definitely go private as you will undoubtedly have better lessons anyway.

to all the peripatetic music teachers out there that do both school and private work!

OP if your son is struggling to keep up, then this is big consideration to move lessons outside of school. It sounds like early days and he may get more organised, but you know your son.

If he mainly wants to master his instrument and is less bothered by the wider music participation, then this is also a plus for moving lessons outside.

Personally, the more my DD does in school, the less I need to organise outside. She also has had benefit of exposure to others areas (ensembles, quartet, solo, choir etc) due to the teachers knowing her better than what she produces on exam results day alone.

Re quality of teaching - obviously I disagree with a generic outside teaching is better than in-house. This is surely a judgement by each school, and what your child gets out of music life. I can only talk from personal experience of schools that place high emphasis on music (irrespective of a pupil aspiring to becoming a musician), as most do not (it's a bloody tough life for those that have/know!) but yet can still enjoy a high quality of musicianship alongside their academic, sports and whatever floats their boat on interests.

I think DC shouldn't miss their academic lessons to learn music. DS1 had this problem is y7, we talked to the teacher and changed the lesson to the teacher's house on Saturday morning. It was not good either, as I have to drive him to there. But I think it is better than missing lessons. Then after a term, the teacher offered us a session after school but is at the school. His school offer Y10&11 sessions before school, lunch time and after school. So it is lower school missing the lessons.

ealing

I think in general the peri's from music services are good, the ensembles too.
Some services offer lessons outside school at a centre. Ours do this, most nights during the week and the amount on offer for very reasonable fees is second to none. £35 in our LA will pay for as many ensembles as you wish to join and the lessons are about £7 for half hour, usually shared with one other.

My main gripe is with the services that are bought in by private companies as admittedly I only go on reputation here and not personal experience but have heard many are dire. Grade 8 and no experience is fine, the company take a huge cut and teachers earn relatively little, well under the normal rate. The teachers are happy with this as only have grade 8.

OP, we found that most peri's taught privately also, would a saturday be any good to you, or do your music service run sessions after school?

After years of silly logistics I have now found a fabulous piano teacher who comes to the house. It was hard to find a good person (there are far too many really bad independent music teachers) but I am so relieved, and so is DD. Worth persevering IMO.

Makes sense Newlife.

How is the system supposed to work, OP?

I ask because my DC have the same (rotating lessons) but they are expected to get in touch with the teacher whose lesson they are missing on advance and "excuse themselves", which also gives the teacher a chance to tell them if there is something they need to catch up on, without relying on the DC asking a classmate.

If this system is in place and date is not using it yet, then it could be just teething problems. TBH, even if you suspect it can't be done, I would ask about rescheduling - whoever did it may think it is fine because it is different lessons each week and not actually have registered that most of them are the same subject...

I do think this is wrong though and as others have suggested it's fine if the school have arrangements for children to complete missed work.

Even at dd specialist music school they are expected to obtain work from the teacher and complete it along with any homework, during prep time.
Sometimes they can miss up to 2 hours of academic classes per day for concerts, practice and music lessons. All the work is usually done during prep and timetable changes on a weekly rotation. It's very clever, I'm not sure how they manage it tbh.

My dd had this. I was very concerned when I realised she was missing lessons in maths and English so we stopped the school music lessons. I know especially in maths if you miss the teaching of a topic how hard it can be to catch up. It seems crazy to timetable this to happen. I wouldn't have minded some things, but not core subjects.

I did think about private lessons out of school but tbh dd was really that invested in music lessons anyway so we let it go.

DDs have just moved from school music lessons, to music lessons st home for the reasons listed above. They much prefer it. The extra hassle of having lessons after school is more than made up for by not having to make up the lessons they had missed.

Is missing lessons so bad at primary, do people think?

My dc are currently having out of school lessons, and one is choosing to stop and a combination of not wanting sibling squabbles and the teacher moving further away has drawn me towards the idea of in school lessons.

The dc who will continue with lessons is Y4.

Oh god sorry, ignore me. I've just seen that it's the secondary education topic...

My DD missed lessons throughout her secondary schooling, twice a week as she played 2 instruments plus other odd days for rehearsals for events. She understood that she had to catch up and quickly became organised, for in class notes she would just photocopy what she had missed.

I can honestly say it didn't cause her to suffer and her GCSE and A level grades show this.

This happened to me in school - I missed the second half of one of two (double period) English lessons each week for music. My GCSE English Lang and lit was entirely coursework which was set each week in the session I missed. I failed my English lit and Scraped a pass in English Lang. I am still cross (two postgrad degrees later) that the school and my parents allowed this. Don't do it!

The set-up in the OP's school does seem very bizarre, and I think I would be moving to out-of-school lessons in that situation.
As a visiting music teacher, I've found that parents often want their children to have lunchtime lessons, but the kids often really hate this, as they miss out on other activities or time with their friends, so you can't win! I spend more time on working out the timetable than I do planning lessons, because it seems that every single child has some special requirements and can't possibly miss x, y or z lessons. Unless I can teach a reasonable number of children within the school day, it isn't worth coming in, so there has to be some flexibility all round.
The bottom line is that some children cope very well with making up missed parts of academic lessons, and others really don't (my child is a non-coper), so if that is the case, you do need to move lessons out of school and accept the extra hassle.

It's actually amazing that schools being so hot on attendance will happily allow pupils to miss lessons on a regular basis

It's not like the child is having time away from learning, though, is it.
Also, having to negotiate their way through missed work, getting allowed out of class when the teacher won't let them go because they think their subject is more important than the music lessons that have been paid for, committing themselves to practice, concerts etc is character-forming.

We have 2 doing 3 sets of lessons each. We moved one out of school altogether. In one case we talk directly to the instrumental teachers to try to control the times so as not to get in the way of core lessons. I quite unashamedly try to get the lessons scheduled in lessons for what I regard as peripheral twaddle (PE, Games, RE, PSHE blah) and avoid real subjects. The school hates it if you do that but if you keep them hazy and work directly with the peripatetics you can minimise the impact on real subjects. We use the odd break as well, though that raises protests!

It works well for my DC, but I do think it depends on the DC and the school. Ours are on a strict rota so you can't fiddle them. Lunchtime isn't available as the staff are running ensembles then. Sixth form get fixed lessons in their frees. DS1 has 2 lessons, and his GCSE results were fab. DD struggles more, so dropped one of hers. Staye school but employs its own teachers, the lessons were worth doing.

It probably depends upon how organised your DC is. My own DC (Yr 7 at the time) was at a school with this system, but we invariably ended up paying for the Music teacher to sit in an empty room as DC kept forgetting to check the board to see which day/time/place the music lesson would be the next week. When they did remember to go, they then forgot to catch up with the work missed in the school lesson instead.
At the end of Yr7 we stopped the lessons. DC decided in Yr9 to teach themselves and several years on, is now of a very high standard and plays regularly. Much cheaper too!

We tried this too and for us it didn't work because...
It's expensive and quality of teaching was hard to monitor and influence direction and style of teaching.
Move to Year 7 was a massive change, the addition of sporadic music lessons to the timetable caused unnecessary stress.
The music teacher didn't always communicate the details of next lesson in time, sometimes the dcs forgot to check everyday - so they missed a few.
The subject teachers were clearly reluctant to release the dcs for music from their class, so they were often 5-10mins late.
Dcs struggled to catch up on work missed, neither child finds subjects easy enough to miss chunks without feeling the pain, they often had to chase subject teachers for homework sheets and instructions given out at the end of the class, and they weren't always immediately available, so they had to make several trips to the staff room looking for them.
So we quit....the dcs had found the whole process so time consuming, unproductive and unpleasant neither wished to learn music even outside school for a year! Our new music teacher is focused on what my dcs want to learn - helping to rekindle their love of music - and the price is pretty much the same.

It probably depends how well the school is organised too. Ours are assigned a letter and can see where there lessons are for the whole term on the wall planner, it moves on two time slots every week with occasional gaps for post 16 lessons. Also ours are subdidised, £7.50 for 25 minutes individual. It was one of the reasons we chose to send our DC there.o the