My relationship with Derby Yamaha Music School goes back over 20 years. I was a student there for about 8 years in total, and around 14 I was selected from roughly 500 pupils to be part of a 20-person band project promoting the school and Yamaha itself — making me the youngest member. That led to a reception job where I managed teacher calendars, collected payments, handled customers directly, and ran day-to-day admin like registers and timetabling.
I was offered a role as a drum teacher which I did for around 10 years. Just before I moved on, I spotted an opportunity: the school was still entirely paper-based, with staff literally cross-referencing bank statements against handwritten pupil lists to track who had paid. I built a working prototype of a pupil management system with a client facing website and pitched it to the owners of the school.
That prototype became the system still running the school today.
What It Replaced
Everything was paper. Pupil records, attendance registers, payment tracking, teacher timetables — all managed manually. Payment reconciliation meant checking the business bank statement line by line against a list of pupils. The only digital record the school had was a single offline spreadsheet created by one of the owners.
Design Thinking
I didn't know it at the time, but I was naturally considering different end-user personas and letting those personas drive my technical decisions. The school owners weren't tech-savvy, but they could get on with a spreadsheet — so building on Google Sheets meant a far easier transition from paper than dropping them into a custom dashboard.
Access control was another key consideration. The system handles PII, so ensuring data was restricted to authorised users was paramount. Gmail accounts turned out to be the simplest solution — an admin account could manage staff access centrally, and controlling Google Sheet permissions is straightforward when everyone is already in the Google ecosystem. That same requirement naturally led to the authentication layer.
Full Pupil Lifecycle
The system covers the entire journey from first enquiry to enrolment right through to the point where pupils may want to finish having lessons. The public-facing website includes a funnel that guides visitors to book a free 30-minute taster lesson. Attendance at that lesson is tracked, and once the pupil agrees to sign up, a staff member clicks a button in Google Sheets to send a pre-populated Google Form — it already contains everything captured at the taster stage, so the client only fills in the additional details needed for full enrolment.
On submission, the data flows into a review sheet checked daily by admins. Staff verify the details and click to approve, which either adds the pupil to a new class list or straight into the master database. From there, daily automations build registers and timetables for teachers automatically.
40% Revenue Increase
The impact was measured by comparing historical records of taster lesson bookings and new enrolments against the data captured by the new system. The school's growth rate — pupil sign-ups versus drop-outs — increased by 40%. The streamlined taster lesson funnel and automated follow-up process meant far fewer prospects fell through the cracks.