Scotland's leading performing arts school on why they switched to Pebble

"Gone are the days of running to the office to get paper."

How Theatre School of Scotland stopped losing revenue to admin — and got their team back in the classroom.

Reece Donnelly has been building Theatre School of Scotland since 2017. Performing arts training for kids from three to eighteen, across four locations in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Greenock, and a brand new site that just opened. There's a sister college now too, degree-level training, the whole pipeline under one roof.

From the outside, it looks like a well-oiled machine. And it is. But for a long time, the back end told a different story.

The stuff nobody sees

Every month, someone on the team was chasing payments. Failed subscriptions piling up. Staff time burned on calls to parents who'd done a trial and hadn't converted. Four sites, four sets of student records, no central place to see any of it.

The trial process alone was a problem. The team had to manually track who had been in, send follow-up emails, and make phone calls. And if it slipped through the cracks — which it did — that revenue was gone. Potentially hundreds, if not thousands of pounds, just from follow-ups that didn't happen fast enough.

The booking system they were using had an automated phone response. Not a person. An automated response.

For a business built on personal relationships with families, that friction added up.

What changed

Theatre School of Scotland came to Pebble the way a lot of performing arts schools do — through word of mouth. They're part of a wider collective of dance and theatre school owners across Scotland and the UK, and Pebble kept coming up. Every school that had switched was saying the same things.

Reece was clear about it: "It was very clear that Pebble was the front runner and everyone was having a great experience. So it was about time we jumped ship."

They were cautious, though. Switching software with a school this size — four sites, hundreds of families, a full class timetable — felt like a risk. The team sat with the decision longer than they probably needed to. But once the conversations started with Pebble, something shifted.

"Through our conversations with the team at Pebble, we were led to be confident in how easy that transition process would be. And in turn, we were able to instill that confidence in our customers."

The subscription problem, solved

The first thing that changed was payment collection. With Pebble, subscriptions run automatically. The collection rate went up. The staff stopped chasing.

The trial-to-subscription conversion was the other big one. Before, it was a manual process and someone had to track trial attendees, send emails, make calls. Now Pebble handles it automatically. Parents are shown exactly what they'll pay at the point of booking: the trial cost, the auto-enrolment price, the monthly fee going forward. No ambiguity. No dropped balls.

Charlotte Forbes, deputy principal, put it simply: "Payments come out on time and everyone is happy."

Four sites. One place.

Kyle Scanlon, general manager, had a different angle on it. For him, the multi-site problem was the one that used to cost the most time.

"Before Pebble, making sure that we had one place to keep all of our clients' information was a real struggle."

Now all four venues run through a single platform. Parents can see and manage everything in one place. Staff can pull up any student record without hunting across systems. And when Theatre School of Scotland added a new site, it was a case of adding it to the platform rather than rebuilding a whole admin process from scratch.

Simple enough to hand to a student

Setting up the class schedule was something the team was nervous about. With the volume of classes they run, the thought of entering each one manually was enough to put the whole thing off.

The clone class feature changed that. Build one class, duplicate it, adjust the details. Charlotte described the experience of working on the platform as intuitive enough that she'd feel comfortable handing it to one of her students.

"It's that easy to use. And I know that my customers have found it to be the same."

A team, not a ticket

The other thing that kept coming up, across all three people in this video, was support.

When Reece's team had questions during setup, someone answered. Not a chatbot. Not an automated response. A person.

"A massive thing for us as an organisation is that we are speaking to a human."

Kyle's experience was the same. From the first conversation on Zoom, through setup, to going live. There was always someone available. Response times are measured in hours, not days. And when the team had feedback on features, that feedback went somewhere. New additions to the platform turned around fast.

"It almost feels like a bespoke service where we've curated new features. And that's all thanks to the developers at Pebble."

Less than six months in

Theatre School of Scotland has been on Pebble for less than six months. The team is already preparing for August, one of their biggest enrolment periods, with a platform that handles trial conversions automatically.

All four of their site coordinators have said the same thing: they've got more time in the classroom. More time on the things that actually grow the school. Less time on admin that the system now handles for them.

That's what Reece built this school for.

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