SpeedAdmin fact file
Age: 15 years
What does it do? SpeedAdmin is a Danish music teaching and learning management system. It has recently merged with Swedish company PlayAlong, which offers lesson creation and content sharing tools. It functions entirely online, with no installations needed.
Who uses it? 600 customers across seven different countries, including Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Germany and the UK. Users in the UK include Berkshire Maestros, Bromley Youth Music Trust, Lancashire Music Service, and Theatr Clwyd.
What are its main selling points? The software is marketed as being a ‘transparent’ solution, offering logins for teachers, students, parents, management and staff. Its features include:
- Attendance and enrolment tools
- Invoicing
- Native video streaming
- Lesson scheduling
- Student discussion forums
- Ability to record directly into the application
- A bank of lessons
- Content creation tools
- Ability to share lessons
You are probably quite familiar with the ethos of secondary level music teaching in the USA. We've all seen the marching bands, a cappella choirs and other ensembles, which, despite being lampooned to death in countless television programmes, offer a supportive environment in which to grow as a musician surrounded by other people of a similar standard. I know that I've often wished that maybe we had a little more of that on this side of the Atlantic. But do you know what lessons we might be able to learn from Denmark? Or Switzerland? Or Germany?
Rapid expansion
Thomas Reng Thomsen, commercial director of SpeedAdmin, has this information at his fingertips, and he doesn't hold back. In fact, transparency with data is what informs SpeedAdmin at a basic level. ‘Our teaching platform delivers a system where everybody has access – the music service, the schools, the parents, the teachers, and the student,’ says Thomsen. ‘It is a transparent system where you work together and which empowers all the different stakeholders, so the relationship with schools, parents and teachers is strengthened.’
The company's growth, from a Danish outfit to a European one, has been explosive; there is a feeling of wind in the sails offer the back of the announcement, last Christmas, of SpeedAdmin's merger with its main Swedish competitor, PlayAlong. This means that the company now serves more than 600 customers in seven different countries. The transition is ongoing and should result in one integrated website by next summer. In the meantime, clients can access both the SpeedAdmin parts of the offering – the business and admin end – and also the PlayAlong elements too, which include content creation tools and the option for teachers to share lessons that they have created.
‘As a teacher, you know what your students like and what works for them, and each teacher can create their own content and store it in the library, then can use it again whenever they need,’ says Thomsen. ‘With PlayAlong, when teachers do their own study plans, many of them choose to share this with other teachers. So other teachers could search for clarinet lessons, for example, and say, “that's really nice, I'm going to use that.” We are seeing teachers sharing their own content in an amazing way. Actually, they are sharing their own content more than they are using the content created professionally. With the merger, the plan is that we will bring this to all the Scandinavian countries, to Germany and also to the UK. Enabling teachers to collaborate together – that's our main goal right now.’
So why should UK teachers care? Well, SpeedAdmin already has a considerable presence in the UK, with 30 schools currently signed up and a target of 40 by the end of the year, and the bigger the user base, the stronger the shared offering.
Differences between the UK and Scandinavia
So, I had to ask. With all of this data on their hands, on the teaching and sharing habits of teachers in multiple countries, are there any ways in which the UK's music teaching stands out? What conclusions can they draw from the way we behave, and how does it compare to our European neighbours?
‘The big difference is that in Scandinavia they're more relaxed about giving everyone access. Teachers are trusted [by service managers] with a lot of access to do things on the system; more so than in the UK. We want to tell UK centres that by giving teachers this access, you don't have to do the extra work and you are simultaneously empowering educators. Companies shouldn't just sit on their data – they need to make it transparent and bring the data to life. That is a stumbling block currently getting in the way of digitising music education.
‘We also see in the UK that music services have an amazing relationship with schools. That is something that a lot of music schools in Scandinavia would envy – how you are able to have qualified music tuition out in schools and have that good relationship. In Scandinavia, music education is very much based around after-school activities. It was more school based at one point, but we lost that, and it is a real shame. It is really inspiring to see how much music services in the UK are able to keep up their relationships with schools.’
Inspiring one another
Thomsen also highlights the UK's grading system as a significant point of difference: ‘We're not used to that at all in Scandinavia. They have it a little bit in Finland, but it is much more laid back. A teacher might single you out to attend a “talent class”, but there we are playing to have fun and not pushing so much. There are a lot of advantages to having a grade system. It is gamification – you want to get to the next level. It is something to strive for, and that is really great.’
Another major difference, says Thomsen, is that across Scandinavia there are no school exams in music. No Music GCSE equivalent, nor A Level. The first music exams in full-time education kick in at post-secondary level, and of course there are auditions for conservatoires. Often in the UK we laud the level of government funding in Scandinavian countries for music, and Thomsen confirms that this is certainly the case: ‘There is lots of funding from the state and from the councils, and there is a law that every council must have their own music school. As a parent you don't have to pay more than one-third of the cost. But still, it is seen as more of a leisure thing than a branch of study.’
In the spirit of learning from one other across their client base, the company is launching SpeedAdmin Academy, which will be a forum for their clients across Europe to get together and talk about how they teach, how they run their services, and, as Thomsen says, ‘how we can be inspired by each other’. ‘We aren't doing things that differently,’ he insists. ‘Music tuition is still music tuition, and it is all about the student. But how can we learn best practice from each other? We have such a big network now that we're trying to put it all out there and do some knowledge sharing. We would like to stir the pot a little. From a European point of view there is a lot we can learn from each other.’
