DaCapo

Idea

DaCapo was established over 28 years ago, initially as a Saturday Music Centre, and has grown over the years with the development of our own music curriculum, publishing arm and the creation of our charitable foundation.

We are now looking to establish an online platform that enables primary teachers with little music expertise to teach music to their class. It's a simple, fun and effective tool that will teach to an ambitiously high level, with relative ease. Most nursery and primary music teaching in the UK is carried out by non-specialists, many of whom struggle with music theory. Even where there are qualified music teachers, they will find it difficult to source a progressive programme of learning and teaching of musical elements and notation.

Using the award-winning DaCapo curriculum, our software will work like an app on an iPad. Everything is taught through songs; the children and their teachers are guided through a variety of activities that help them to learn all the elements of music - pulse, pitch, rhythm, expressive elements coordination, improvisation/composition, literacy and performance.

Please see the testimonials in the “Key Documents” section.

Substantial accomplishments to date

DaCapo has 30 years of experience in music education.

Over 40,000 children have been taught with our methods.

We currently deliver classroom music in nine London primary schools and run a Saturday Music School for over 100 pupils.

Over 100 teachers have trained with us since 2000.

We’ve written a fully published curriculum. It was the winner of the Rhinegold Award in 2014.

DaCapo projects have taken place across the UK and also in the Netherlands, Spain, Singapore and Indonesia. Our in-schools' work began after a hugely successful project in Northern Ireland in 2000 which was designed to get quality music teaching into more primary schools. The project taught us that a higher level of music-making can be achieved with short daily activities delivered by the children’s class teacher than can be achieved by a music specialist visiting once a week. With this knowledge, we developed a training programme for school teachers who have little or no musical knowledge (leading to the Rhinegold Award in 2014).

Many years of running a busy and thriving Saturday Music School has enabled us to develop a full curriculum from Toddlers to Adults which has been tried and tested over the years. We also have comprehensive short term or long term training programmes for both classroom teachers and specialist musicians.

Thus far these projects, classes and trainings have been carried out through our charitable foundation. We are now looking to utilise this experience to create a revenue generating business by digitalising and productising our curriculum.

Monetisation strategy

The software packages will be sold to schools on a licence/subscription model.

Each Key Stage* costs between £200 -£500 per annum depending on the size of the school.

We are aiming to sell 500 licences in year 1 and 4300 by year 6.

*Key Stage F&EY = Early Years.
Key Stage 1= Infants.
Key Stage 2 = Juniors

Use of proceeds

The £80,000 we hope to raise on this initial private Seedrs round is expected to be enough to see the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) built and enough material to take us into the market and enable us to secure feedback, testimonials, a following and the first advance sales.

A further public round on Seedrs is planned and that will pay for the completion of the product for every primary school year, for sales, marketing and the general running of the new business.