The Instructor Who Is Always Five Minutes Late

Five minutes late every week is usually a timetable problem

Your instructor walks in a few minutes after the class was due to start, apologising, while the children wait at the door and their parents watch. Before you treat it as a discipline problem, look at the timetable, because lateness that repeats at the same slot every week is usually built into it.

One-off lateness has a different cause every time, such as a flat tyre, a sick child or a storm. Lateness that lands at the same few minutes on the same day is a pattern, and a pattern usually has something fixed underneath it. That holds whether you run a swim school, a dance or music studio or a tutoring centre.

It is easy to put off, because five minutes feels too small to raise. It is not small to the class. The opening minutes are when the children settle, and a group that spent them waiting starts the session unsettled.

What should you check before you say anything?

Lay out the instructor's whole week, not only the slot where they arrive late, and ask three questions of it. Each one points at something you can change without a difficult conversation.

First, what ends just before your class? A part-time instructor may teach at another venue, study or do a school run, and a class elsewhere that finishes on the hour cannot put them in your room on the hour. If the slot before yours ends when yours begins, the timetable has made them late, and so has whoever agreed to it.

Second, what are they expected to do before the class starts? Setting out mats, tuning instruments, writing a starter problem on the board and checking who is due all take time. If the agreement pays for class minutes only, the setup is unpaid, and an instructor who arrives at the start time is doing what they are paid for.

Third, what does on time mean at your centre? If nobody has said, the instructor has decided for themselves, and the usual answer is the minute the class begins. Five minutes late against that is later still against what you needed, which was a ready room before the first child walked in.

Check the room too. A class before theirs that overruns, or a door nobody unlocks until the hour, makes an instructor look late when they were waiting outside.

Happy Kamper holds the class schedule, so the start and end time of every class you run sits in one place, and two classes placed back to back are easy to spot. It shows the classes you have scheduled, not the instructor's work elsewhere, so the slot before yours at another venue is something you have to ask about.

Fix the timetable before you fix the person

Much of what turns up in that check has a timetable answer. Move the class a quarter of an hour later, swap it with a slot that does not follow their other job, or give the class before it a firm finish so the room is free.

Where setup is the problem, pay for it. Add a fixed arrival time before each class to the agreement and pay it at the class rate, so the instructor is no longer giving you that time for free. Weigh that cost against a class that starts late every week in front of the parents paying for it.

If neither change is possible, say so to the instructor and agree an arrival point they can actually meet. A start time moved a few minutes later and announced to parents is better than one everyone at the centre knows is not real.

What does a staff lateness policy need to say?

Once the timetable allows it, write the expectation into one short policy that every instructor gets at hire, not only the one who is late. A policy written for one person reads as an accusation, and one written for everyone is simply how the centre runs.

It needs five things. The arrival point, as a set number of minutes before class, and whether that time is paid. Who to message when they are running late, and by when, so you hear before the class is due rather than after it.

Who starts the class if they are not there, whether that is you, an assistant or a holding activity the children already know. What counts as a pattern, such as three late arrivals in a term, so nobody argues about whether it has become a problem. And what happens at each step, from a conversation to a written note to a review of whether the slot stays theirs.

Keep pay out of the consequences unless you have taken advice first. Whether and how a centre may reduce wages for lateness is an employment law question, and that wording belongs with an adviser before it goes into any agreement.

How do you have the conversation?

Have it in private, soon after a late start rather than weeks later, and open with what you saw rather than what you think of it. "You arrived after the start on each of the last four Tuesdays" is something the instructor can answer, while "you are always late" is something they can only defend against.

Then ask what is in the way, and listen for the answers from your check. If the slot before yours is the cause, you will usually hear it early, and the rest of the conversation is about which fix to use.

Close on one change and a date to look at it again. Agree the new arrival point or the moved slot, say which part of the policy applies from now, and review it after a few weeks rather than at the next late arrival.

Keep it separate from feedback on their teaching, which belongs in a scheduled visit to their class. Mixing the two makes the instructor hear one as a verdict on the other.

Still late once the timetable allows it

If the slot has room in it, the arrival time is paid, the policy is clear and the lateness carries on, the schedule can no longer fix it. Follow the steps in the policy in order, write down each late start with the date and how late it was, and tell the instructor at each step which step it is.

Keep the children's side apart from the instructor's. A class must never wait without an adult, so whoever the policy names starts it every time, whether or not the conversation has happened yet. That is the same arrangement you need when an instructor calls in sick before class.

If the instructor cannot move their other commitment, the honest answer may be a different slot rather than a warning. A good instructor in the wrong slot is worth keeping, and the slot is the easier of the two to change.