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The Freelance Economy Behind UK Music Education

Ask most people to picture a music teacher and they won't picture a sole trader with a folder of unpaid invoices. That's the reality for a big slice of the UK's peripatetic music teaching workforce though. They're working musicians who'll teach violin in a school hall on Tuesday morning, run piano lessons out of the front room on Wednesday afternoon and spend Thursday chasing money they're already owed. There's no holiday pay, nobody's paying into a pension for them, and when a pupil quits halfway through term that income will simply vanish.

Freelance and self-employed workers account for roughly 72% of the music, performing and visual arts sector, going by DCMS figures. That's close to five times the national self-employment rate. Narrow it down to music teachers and it tilts further still, with most peripatetic and private instrumental tutors working as sole traders.

The gap between what these tutors are told to charge and what actually lands in their bank account says a lot about how the creative economy treats the people holding it up.

What Music Teachers Are Told to Charge vs What They Actually Get
The Musicians' Union's recommended minimum for individual tuition in 2025/26 is £44 an hour, which lines up reasonably well with what self-employed tutors will charge in independent schools.

Step outside London and the South East and the numbers drop. The ISM's 2026 fees survey put the median hourly rate for self-employed visiting music teachers in state-funded schools at £37. In Music Hubs it came out at £36. So there's a £7 to £8 gap between the union's floor and what plenty of tutors are actually paid.

And £36 an hour won't behave like a salary. No employer is covering NI, nobody's topping up a pension, and there's no paid leave waiting at the end of the summer term. Once the running costs of a small business come out, instrument repairs, travel, insurance, DBS checks, an accountant, the real hourly figure will shrink again.

How Online Lessons Changed the Maths
The scramble to teach over video during the pandemic rewrote the sums for freelance tuition, and that change has stuck around.

Before 2020, a peripatetic teacher might easily spend an hour in the car between schools for every two hours of teaching. Online lessons wiped out nearly all of that unpaid travel. A guitar tutor in Leeds will teach a pupil in Cornwall at four and another in Edinburgh at five without going anywhere near the front door. It's widened the client base too. A bassoon teacher in rural Devon won't be stuck relying on the same three or four local families any more.

The catch is that finding music teaching work isn't local any more. Once a parent in Manchester can book a violin teacher from anywhere in the country, the tutor down the road will be up against hundreds of others. Some have dropped their prices to keep up, which drags the going rate even further below the union's minimum.

Even so, the ISM's 2026 survey found 44% of private music teachers had done no online teaching at all, up from 37% the year before. A lot of people are heading back into the room.

Where Freelance Tutors Find Music Teaching Work
Private teaching has always run on word of mouth. A recommendation at the school gate will still bring in more pupils than anything else, though it's slow going and it won't do much for somebody starting from scratch. Some tutors pick up work through freelancer platforms, while others have built their own websites and wait for the enquiries to arrive.

None of it happens on its own. Freelance music teachers are marketing themselves constantly, and none of that time gets paid. A salaried teacher in a school won't spend August wondering where next term's pupils will come from. A freelance tutor will, every single year.

The Knock-On Effect on the UK's Music Industry
The people teaching children to play an instrument today are feeding the pipeline for an industry that put £8 billion of GVA into the UK economy in 2024. If tutors can't make the income work, they'll go and do something else. Plenty already have.

The years after the pandemic saw a lot of skilled freelancers walk away from the creative sector, mostly because the money wouldn't hold steady and there was nothing underneath to catch them when it dipped. Music teaching took a harder hit than most, since it combines all the usual freelance insecurity with the low rates that publicly funded Music Hubs will pay.

Better access to freelancer pension schemes will help. So will clearer guidance on fair pay from the bodies handing out the work, and continued investment in Music Hubs. But it starts with recognising that the person teaching your child the clarinet is running a small business, and ought to be paid like it.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Helen White .