In April 2024, Hannah, a teacher in a Kent primary school where she is in charge of music, thought she had successfully set up weekly drum lessons for around 10 children. She had found a company to provide them: Totally Rad, based in the West Midlands.
Totally Rad Hub is one of the big players in a part of the education economy that has boomed as public funding for music in state schools has been squeezed: private companies that supply freelance instrument teachers. The company says it has a network of 200 freelance tutors providing instrument lessons to about 300 schools and 5,000 families.
It offers one-to-one tuition delivered in either 15-, 20- or 30-minute lessons, charging parents prices equivalent to £40 an hour (excluding VAT). It’s a lucrative business: Totally Rad’s income from schools was projected to surpass £1m in 2024.
But according to the company’s promotional material, Totally Rad’s mission is all about the music. Because it is run by musicians, the company says it understands “the challenges of developing musical skills and pursuing dreams”. It promises “experienced teachers”. Its corporate communication style is chirpy and upbeat: one of its favoured catchphrases is “You’re awesome. We’re RAD”.
At Hannah’s school, the experience didn’t quite match that hype.
A drum kit from Totally Rad duly arrived and all the kids who had signed up had a first lesson from their new drum tutor. But on the second week he didn’t show up. Totally Rad hadn’t supplied Hannah with a phone number and she couldn’t find one online, so she asked why he had been absent using an email address she had been given. She got a reply four days later saying there had apparently been a “personal emergency”.
The tutor returned for two more sessions but then disappeared again. The first explanation the company offered put his absence down to “unforeseen circumstances”, which was followed by news that his commute to the school had proved to be financially unviable.
“He did three lots of lessons and that was him done,” Hannah said. Totally Rad said lessons were now “on hold” and assured her it was trying to find a replacement.
Wendy Hollands’ son Riley was then eight years old and had been thrilled that his mum had signed him up for drum lessons (he is a massive Pink Floyd fan, she says). “Each week he came home and I said to him: ‘How was drumming?’ He was like, ‘I didn’t go again – they didn’t get me.’ He was missing it,” Hollands said. Riley is awaiting an autism and ADHD diagnosis. “He was coming home and taking it out on us because he wasn’t doing the drumming.”
Back at the school, Hannah had also been waiting for a Totally Rad singing teacher since April. One finally turned up in early June but only provided one day of lessons. The school were told this was due to a bereavement.
The seeming lack of reliability was one thing but by now the parents she was dealing with had another very glaring grievance: they had paid upfront for drumming and singing lessons that hadn’t happened. Hannah said she contacted Totally Rad with a clear instruction: “You have to tell our parents that this is not happening and refund them immediately.” But that “took months and months and months”, she said.
No more singing lessons ever happened. In September last year, Totally Rad finally sent the school a drum teacher. That lasted two months before the new teacher told Hannah he was leaving Totally Rad. The school, and its children, were once more in limbo.
At this point Hannah decided to quit using Totally Rad. The company initially met her suggestion that their contractual arrangement should end in February 2025 with an insistence that it should carry on until Easter (at one point, Totally Rad recommended that the school hire independent legal advice to try to resolve this), and insisted it could fill the resulting gap with yet another drum teacher. But no one ever came.
By the spring of 2025, though Totally Rad had not come to collect its drum kit, Hannah was confident she would not have to deal with the company ever again and that the issues with families’ money had been resolved. But in June she was contacted by around 10 parents who had either suddenly had money taken from their accounts by Totally Rad or been notified that it was attempting to do so.
The company later told her that some of the invoices it demanded payment for “were raised in error”, but “in some instances they related to underpayments from parents during the period when lessons were active”. It offered no explanation of why it had suddenly contacted parents six months after its lessons had ended.
One of these parents was Hollands. “I emailed them,” she said. “I was like: ‘Is there a reason I’m being charged again when my son’s lessons are no longer with you?’ They didn’t respond. And they tried taking more payments the following days – three times. They eventually replied. They tried telling me that I was overdue a balance from December, six months beforehand – but when I checked my Totally Rad account, it said ‘paid’.”
Totally Rad said there was an unresolved balance in the account which triggered the automated payment system to issue a payment reminder. Once the company was alerted, the invoice was voided and no payment taken. They denied the allegation that there were multiple requests for payment.
Totally Rad said the cancellation of sessions was “regrettable” and that any lessons that do not take place are not chargeable but do remain credited on an account for future sessions.
It denied threatening the school with legal action and said it simply reminded the school of its contractual obligations. Totally Rad said it agreed to terminate its working relationship with the school with no financial penalty. It said this was a gesture of goodwill.
These answers and claims from the company arrived in my inbox a fortnight ago. But at around the same time it became aware that the Guardian was investigating its affairs, Totally Rad seems to have started a comprehensive rebranding exercise. The Totally Rad Hub website has now been cleared of all content, and brings up a single message: “This site is restricted and not publicly accessible.”
At the time of writing, a Totally Rad website that recruits new freelance teachers is still live. There were residual traces of the company’s old corporate identity on YouTube. But it seems the people involved want to somehow move on. Many of the parents and teachers I have spoken to , by contrast, feel that Totally Rad still needs to be held accountable for a long list of failures.
‘I’ve never taught music before’
I first encountered Totally Rad in March this year. Until the end of the recent summer term, my son James went to an autism specialist school in Somerset called the Mendip school, and like many autistic people he is extremely musical. He told me he wanted to learn the piano, and when the school said it had arranged for Totally Rad to deliver its services, I provisionally signed him up.
Because of his autism, James has a singular learning style, and teaching him is best done by someone who understands neurodivergence. If things go wrong, it can poison his interest in whatever he is learning. So I emailed Totally Rad with a reasonable request: could I speak to the tutor involved? Two days later, I got an answer: “We don’t have a phone number to be contacted on but we are more than happy to discuss any of your concerns.” So I asked again: could the tutor who would be working with James call me? “We are happy to pass on any information to our teacher you may have,” said the reply.
After more back-and-forth exchanges, I then received an email suddenly agreeing that “speaking with the teacher in advance” was in fact a “vital part” of “every child receiving the support they need to learn in a way that works best for them”. But by then I was fearing the worst. “I’ll leave it,” I said.
Totally Rad says there is a phone line available for teachers and tutors and schools, but not for the parents of the children being taught. The company communicates with parents via a secure messaging platform called Intercom. This, it said, was for safeguarding reasons.
What happened next echoes the experiences of many of the parents I have spoken to. Over 17 days, I was sent 24 text messages – sometimes at the rate of two a day, at completely random times – demanding money for lessons I had not agreed to (at one point, the fee went up from £78 to £120.90) and that were not going to happen.
Totally Rad said these messages were from an automated system and related to amounts I would have owed had the lessons taken place. It voided my invoice, it said, as a gesture of goodwill.
I later discovered what had happened after Totally Rad sent a teacher to the Mendip school, in a long conversation with the school’s spokesperson. “It was 16 May, which was a Friday, when we had the first lesson,” he said. “They sent this chap out … and I said: ‘What experience have you had working with children with special needs?’ He said: ‘I actually only found out it was a special school when I Googled it myself.’”
As far as the school understands, the teacher had done this the night before he turned up. He was scheduled to teach 14 autistic children.
“I said: ‘How much music teaching have you done?’,” the school spokesperson said. “He said: ‘This is my first day. I’ve never taught music before.’ He said to get the job he had had to send Totally Rad a video of him playing the guitar. His words were: ‘I think they just wanted somebody in the job quick, so they hired me within about three weeks.’”
He was also scheduled to teach the piano, which he said he could play “a bit”. Fearing things might go badly wrong, a full-time teacher had to sit in on the first lessons and leave his class of nine-, 10- and 11-year-olds in the hands of support staff. “It very quickly became apparent that the Totally Rad teacher was just out of his depth,” the spokesperson told me. “He didn’t really know how to handle our children. There was none of the animation you’d need to get children excited. There was just nothing.
“I have no issues with this lad – I mean, he really did try his best. But he shouldn’t have been placed in that position.”
The school sent its first email alerting Totally Rad to serious concerns and raising the prospect of cancelling its arrangement on 16 May and received no replies, aside from a suggestion to try a different email address, and a claim – on 13 June – that the member of staff who could deal with this would be “returning shortly from annual leave”. By the start of July – six weeks after the first teacher had turned up – the Mendip school had still received no acknowledgment of its problems.
The staff concerned made their grievances plain: “As a school, we are appalled with our experience with Totally Rad, from sending an individual who is unqualified to teach music, particularly to students with additional learning needs. Perhaps more upsetting, however, is the way in which your company has hounded our parents for payments, sending multiple emails and messages each day.”
Totally Rad did not address the fact that its tutor did not know he was teaching autistic children and had never done so. It did say that suggestions a tutor was simply thrown in without verified checks on quality or suitability were “unfounded” and misrepresented its recruitment process. That process, it said, includes a performance video and interview, with responses assessed against an internal scoring system.
The school also raised another issue: “There are parents who have unknowingly paid for music lessons for September who have since rung to request a refund, only to be told [by Totally Rad] that these lessons will be taking place. They will not.”
Because of the contract it signed with Totally Rad, at the end of the recent summer term the Mendip school was still hosting lessons provided by the teacher it was sent. Teaching assistants have to be present in all of them. Two weeks ago, the school sent the company an email repeating the fact that it wanted to cancel its contract and informing it that a member of staff was speaking to the Guardian. A reply came back within an hour, along with confirmation that the contract would be ended.
In researching the company, my attention was quickly drawn to a fascinating subplot in the story of Totally Rad on the consumer reviews website TrustPilot. In early June, when I read some profoundly negative descriptions of the company’s services posted on there (there are 43 one-star reviews, out of a total of 51), I posted my own. I mentioned some of my experiences and explained that I would soon be writing this article. At around the same time, the Totally Rad branding on the relevant page of that website suddenly changed to that of “Winston Farriers”, a horse-riding company of which I could find no record.
There was also a review credited to “Anon” enthusing about “a five-star experience from start to finish”, in which the staff had “matched each rider to the right horse, and kept the pace right for everyone”. For a while, these changes meant any Trustpilot user had to scroll down to find any mention of Totally Rad’s music tuition.
A spokesperson for Trustpilot told me this change happened when the owner of Totally Rad registered with the website decided to “claim” its profile, a change that lets companies reply to their reviews. “We were informed by a whistleblower report that the business had changed the name of the profile to a domain not associated with the company,” he said. “Once this was confirmed by our internal teams, we changed it back to the original name and sent an educational message as part of our enforcement process, which was acknowledged by the business owner.”
The rebranding has been reversed and the horse-riding review has disappeared.
Totally Rad’s lawyers told us “our client has no understanding of why the page was temporarily changed”, and that some of the reviews on Trustpilot were not reflective of their customer base.
A spokesperson from Trustpilot confirmed that changes on the company profile were actioned by a user using a Totally Rad Music business email address.
Totally Rad has threatened at least two people who have posted reviews on Trustpilot with legal action. One is Hannah, the teacher in Kent. In June, she posted a negative review on the website. She then received two emails from Totally Rad’s “operations director”, Josh Hall. The first said: “I’ve been alerted to a public review containing defamatory claims which appears to align with your first name,” and asked for confirmation that she had written it.
The second was legal. It said her review was “demonstrably false and malicious in nature” and threatened her with legal action under the Defamation Act 2013. As a result, Hannah spoke to me for this article under a pseudonym, and the school has declined to be named.
‘They were terrible at communicating’
Samuel Morgan was willing to speak to me on the record. He is a self-employed music tutor based in London, and one of several former Totally Rad tutors I spoke to, all of whom talked about late payments and poor communication; two of them have resorted to legal action to try to secure money the company owes them.
Morgan is a drummer. To demonstrate his skills, he had sent the company a video of him playing Starless, by the 1970s prog-rock band King Crimson. But he says he was not asked any meaningful questions about his aptitude for teaching. “There was nothing like that,” he said. He also agreed to teach guitar and piano.
“It was the first proper job I’d had after leaving uni,” he said. Totally Rad said he would be paid around four weeks after each working month had come to an end: for September, he was told, he’d be paid at the end of October. “But they were terrible at communicating,” he claims. “The first story that was spun to me was maybe two weeks after my invoice was overdue. They said: ‘Can you amend some things on your invoice?’ Another few weeks went by. I was sending emails like: ‘Just checking – are there any issues here?’ And then the finance manager said: ‘Sorry there have been delays, we’ve been switching over to a new payment system. We’ll get you paid shortly.’”
By now it was “well into November”. He was finally paid for the work he had done in September after getting help from the Musicians’ Union. By then he had decided to stop working for Totally Rad.
“When I handed in my notice, that’s when they started being ridiculously difficult with payments,” he claimed. “I had to pay my rent. I was having to borrow money off people. It was a miserable Christmas because of that.”
He finally got paid for his work in October at the end of December, but then he began chasing Totally Rad for another two months’ worth of fees that had not been paid. “I remember sending emails with links to songs with money in the title: Money, by Pink Floyd, and Money For Nothing, by Dire Straits,” he said. His outstanding invoices were finally paid in February this year.
Totally Rad said each candidate was put through a detailed and structured selection process, including a video performance and an interview. It said invoices were paid within 30 days of receiving correct invoices, and that it was within its right to delay payment until accurate invoices were received.
The Musicians’ Union’s recommended hourly rate for instrument teachers who work in schools is £44 an hour. Its national organiser for education, Chris Walters, says the union has been concerned about privately run music tuition services for about a decade, but issues about the way they operate have noticeably intensified over the past few years.
“If schools lack confidence and knowledge in music, they see these companies as a great solution,” he said. “And so the door’s wide open for people to come in who are actually offering a substandard product. And that includes the way that they treat their teachers and the way they prepare them to go into schools.”
This is, at least in part, yet another story about the long shadow cast by austerity. A big factor in the rise of such companies, Walters said, had been a post-2012 funding freeze for music hubs: local organisations that are meant to coordinate music teaching in state schools, with finance provided by the Department for Education. Their financial problems have been reflected in a decline in instrument teaching, and a sense that much of what remains is delivered on a hand-to-mouth basis.
In October last year, Totally Rad announced it had secured £100,000 in debt finance – from public money – from the Midlands Engine Investment Fund II, a scheme overseen by the state-owned British Business Bank.
Those funds, Totally Rad said, would partly be used to support the development of a new online platform, which would “complement the existing service by enabling pupils to continue lessons during the school holidays or allow those in rural areas to access lessons when there are no local teachers available”.
Meanwhile, there are people with grievances all over the country.
Beccy Marshall lives in Saddleworth, in Greater Manchester. Last autumn, her daughter said she was interested in Totally Rad drum tuition at her school, but then she changed her mind. Her mum cancelled the lessons that had been planned.
“But she came home from school and said they’d pulled her into a drumming lesson,” Marshall said. “I was really annoyed. I thought: ‘You’ve not had my consent to do that.’ I’d cancelled it. But Totally Rad then hounded me. And honestly, it made me ill.
“It was constant texts, constant emails, and I kept trying to contact them to say ‘I cancelled this, I don’t want the lessons’. And the only time they would reply would be to say: ‘You didn’t cancel it’. I was sending them screenshots to say: ‘Look I’ve got this to show you I have cancelled it.’ And they would just keep hounding me for this money. The money was going up as well, they were putting charges on it, late payment fees.
“I think I even said in one of my messages: ‘You are just a music provider to schools. My bank doesn’t hound me like this.’”
In most of what she says, there is a familiar element of so many accounts of dealing with Totally Rad: a kind of grim amazement that something as simple – and potentially life-changing – as teaching music to children could be so fraught with difficulty and bad feeling. “It was bonkers,” she said. “Bonkers.”
Totally Rad says bill payers are liable to pay for sessions unless cancelled in advance in writing, otherwise automated reminders are sent out until the issue is resolved. In many cases we have reported on, Totally Rad has agreed to cancel outstanding payments for lessons which have not yet happened. This, it said, was done out of good will.
Totally Rad said it had attempted to deal with all issues raised in this article, many of which were caused by circumstances outside its control, in a professional and timely manner. It also said the business had supported schools, donated free instruments and provided lessons and opportunities for children from all backgrounds.
Its lawyers, Taylor Hampton, said the allegations in this article “are not only inaccurate, they are also defamatory of our client”. This language closely mirrors that used in letters sent by Totally Rad to tutors and teachers, whose pupils have just wanted to learn to play music.
