Why growth isn't always good news

The day I enrolled my thirtieth student, I forgot the name of my fifteenth. I was at the end of a day full of lessons, typing a welcome email to the new student, and halfway through I couldn’t remember whether Emma or Elisa was the one who had been with me for two years. I hadn’t expected that. I’d been proud of the growth. More sign-ups, more income, more proof that something was working. But that slip stayed with me for the rest of the evening.

Growth is held up to us as a goal in itself. Bigger school, more students, maybe a second teacher. In the music world that ambition is present too, even if it tends to be quieter than in other industries. But the idea that bigger also means better isn’t always true. Sometimes growth destroys exactly what you’ve built.

The first thing that disappears is margin. Not financial margin — that increases for a while — but thinking margin. When you have fifteen students, you know more about each of them than their name and instrument. You know who has an exam coming up, who just had a disappointing match, who has tension at home. That knowledge changes your lesson. You can’t force a thirteen-year-old to open up to a difficult piece, but if you know he’s tired, you approach it differently. That kind of attention doesn’t scale well.

With forty students you unconsciously do what every system does when it’s overloaded: you default to the average. You give the lesson that works for most people. That’s not negligence, it’s survival. But it’s also the moment you stop teaching and start processing.

A colleague of mine hired a second teacher last year. Necessary, because she had more students than she could manage. The first few months went well. But after a while she noticed some students starting to compare. The other teacher does it differently. The other teacher likes this more. The quality barely differed, but the consistency was gone. And in music education, consistency is everything. A student who experiences the same framework every week — even as the content changes — makes faster progress than a student who keeps having to figure out how the lesson will go.

Growth also demands something of your administration that most teachers underestimate. With ten students you keep it in your head or a notebook. With twenty it starts to strain. With thirty you’re actively losing information without realising it. You forget that two months ago you agreed something about the pace of the pieces. You no longer remember the last time someone practised something at home that actually clicked. That information was once the quiet engine of your lessons.

There’s a threshold at which the system takes over from you if you haven’t set that system up yourself. The lesson then becomes an obligation you get through, rather than a moment you deliberately design. That’s the difference between a busy music teacher and a good one, and growth can put you on either side of that line.

This isn’t an argument for staying small. Some teachers are perfectly capable of guiding forty students and even getting better at it. But that requires deliberate design. Systems that restore the margin that growth takes away. Ways to still know what’s going on, even when you no longer know everyone off by heart.

What I understood that evening is that there’s a difference between growing and expanding. Expanding is doing more of the same. Growing is adapting yourself so you can keep giving something better than what you were doing before. The question isn’t whether you want more students. The question is whether your school can handle more students without the ones already there losing something in the process.

I don’t always know the right answer. But I do know that I had Emma in front of me the next hour, and I could have started that lesson better if I’d remembered more about her from the week before than just her name.