[Matthew Rusk]

This is a great question, Eliza Fyfe down in Bristol is convinced that 45 mins works better as you can fit more students in paying a relatively higher per hour price across an evenings teaching. I guess it all comes down to price points and whether the 45 minute lesson is weighted higher per hour than the per hour lesson if that makes sense. So x4 45 min lessons @£25 = £100 and x3 60 min lessons @£30 = £90, means that the 45 min lessons works out better for the teacher across 3 hours teaching.
I also found 45 min lessons worked really well for teenage students (although I know you don’t teach them) as 45 mins was just about the right amount of time that they really concentrated for. I think it might be linked to schools like mine where 50 min lessons were the norm.

[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!