[Matthew Rusk]

Unfortunately, collecting age and gender of students wouldn’t be possible as we wouldn’t be able to collect that type of data on a national level. All the data would be generated at the enquiry stage and asking for gender and age is more prohibitive to quick enquiries, so it would have to be collected by teachers on a case by case basis. Questions that might be possible to answer is the number of times a student has taken a lesson, how frequently those lessons are and the average number of lessons a student will take before they stop taking lessons – all of this could be done by counting the number of occurrences of a students name in the lessons record database and reformating that data into a useful output.

[Matthew Rusk]

Absolutely, specifically what stats would you be interested in know?

For example:

The average number of lessons that you teach to students? (Show average life-cycle)

Currently how many students you teach have been taking lessons for less than 12 months, less than 24 months and more than 36 months.

What questions would you ask of the data if you had it in front of you?

[Matthew Rusk]

Hi Phil, really interesting topic to raise – I have also thought about this. There might be some statistics that can be drawn out on a national level that might provide some good data analysis to provide more information around this topic. Do you think if information like this was presented back to teachers it would be useful? If there is a lot of interest in this from other teachers I am sure it can become a project at some point.

[Matthew Rusk]

I have always been interested when I hear politicians talking about the economy “growing” because it is such a strange word to describe what they mean. Economies don’t grow or shrink in the same way a living thing might, it is the liquidity of movement of money through the system – you want people to be buying more things, so more transactions take place.

What you don’t want is people to sit on money, as without transactions there is nothing to tax. So really when they talk about the “economy growing”, they want to say “an economy with ever more transactions taking place over time”

This analogy of economic growth is so widespread and I think it is such an unhelpful one that I wonder whether some people really believe we are “growing” the economy, without considering what that really means!

[Matthew Rusk]

I would agree with much of the above, especially when you look at the impact on students in areas like Swindon where there have been lots of redundancies from well-established companies in the area.

Earlier this week, one of the teachers I know in Swindon decided to offer pro-rata lessons to a young student whos dad had been made redundant until he finds a new job. This highlights the challenges currently for families due to a difficult economic environment – the son loved his music lessons yet there had to be cut as the family tightened their budget.

As you mention music lessons are one of the first things to go in an economic downturn as they are not as important as food, housing and basic bills. One note that is positive is that I started setting all of MGR Music Tuition up from 2008 onwards just after the worst economic recession in the recent past so I am positive that even in economic downturns that there will be a stream of students coming through even in the most challenging of economic times – this is very much influenced by the micro-economic factors to that city and its relative affluence compared to the national average.

Phil did you watch/read some of the films/books about the last economic downturn in 2008 and what was going on in Iceland with the banks? I couldn’t believe what I was watching/reading about.