Book a free trial class

How it works

1. Pick a class and a date

   Any class in the timetable marked as taking trials, on any of the dates it meets this term. Book it on the timetable page or telephone the office.

2. Come fifteen minutes early

   Long enough to find the room, change, and meet the teacher before fourteen other people arrive.

3. Wear roughly the right thing

   Nothing needs buying for a trial. Something to move in and bare feet will do for every class except tap, and for tap we will lend shoes.

4. Decide afterwards, not in the corridor

   Nobody will ask you at the door. Enrol online whenever you have decided, and the place is counted then rather than held.

A trial holds a place, and that has a consequence

This is the part most schools do not say. A trial student is in the room, in the register and in the teacher's attention, exactly as an enrolled student is. So a trial takes a place — on that one date rather than on every date, but a real place.

Which means a full class cannot take a trial. If it could, a class with sixteen places and sixteen students would quietly become a class of seventeen whenever somebody asked nicely, and the number on the timetable would be a decoration. The enrolment system counts trials against the capacity of the date they fall on. That is a deliberate piece of arithmetic and it is the easiest thing in a booking system of this shape to get wrong.

A free trial holds a place. A free trial holds a place in the class for that week, exactly as an enrolment does. That is why a full class cannot take one — a trial that quietly overfilled a class would be the same thing as lying about the capacity.

The classes that do not take trials, and why

six classes in the timetable are marked as not taking trials. They are the upper-level dance classes and the continuing guitar group, and the reason is not exclusivity: a class working on material built over several terms cannot usefully absorb a stranger for one evening, and the stranger has a bad hour. For those, the right route is a conversation with the teacher and usually a term in the level below.

One per student per discipline

A student may trial ballet once, jazz once and piano once. They may not trial three different ballet classes looking for the one with their friend in it — not out of meanness, but because each of those is a place taken from somebody who would have enrolled, and the teacher spends the evening settling somebody who is leaving.

Adults get the same one per discipline, and the same welcome.