Student Retention Tips (All Teachers)

[Kat Hunter]

Great question! I think two things I’ve come up with that help retain students are:
1. Performance opportunities – These could be a performance/open mic hosted by your studio or outside opportunities if the student is in a choir, band or musical theatre group. When students have opportunities to perform they have more and more goals to work towards, which gives them more reasons to continue coming back for lessons.
2. Offering some other areas to grow – as teachers we tend to have one or two areas that we stick to and most of us spend a lot of time on vocal technique. But students who don’t have opportunities to work on other things can feel their progress begin to stagnate sometimes. So offering things like song-writing, music theory, performance technique, or simply just singing songs in a different genre to what they’re used to can change things up a bit and keep it interesting. Technology can help too. Recording a student’s rendition of a song they’re working on (even if it’s just on your laptop) and burning to disk, or just having a microphone/PA in the room can make things more exciting!

Would love to hear other ideas people have!

[Matt Pocock]

Agreed, both wonderful ideas for keeping on students. On a more fundamental level – never being afraid to send another email to a student who you had a great lesson with, but never came back for a follow-up. So often they’ll have just forgotten, or will assume you’re busy, or will be reticent taking the first move. So send that email!

[Eliza Fyfe]

Agree with Kat – I do quarterly showcases and always get them focussing on a new song ready to record all properly! I have had students with me for 2-3 years due to changing things up enough to keep them interested, so this is always good! Especially as I’m refreshing my own knowledge as time goes on, so they get a piece of that too! Matt’s following up tip is good too.