Excel Music School celebrates 25 years at the top after chance school meeting for founder

A Swadlincote music school has been hitting the high notes for a quarter of a century - after a chance meeting led to the launch of a much loved facility with eight staff and 1,000 students.

Steve Mansfield, founder of Excel Music School, was a teenager when he was eagerly approached by the head teacher of a Burton school desperate for a pianist before its plans for a harvest festival fell apart.

Twenty-five years later, the music school now offers curriculum teaching, instrumental tuition and after school activities to children from two to 18-years-old plus.

In addition it puts on annual concerts named Musicshare featuring the children at Hill Street Baptist Church. Steve Mansfield, who is now principal and managing director, said: "These concerts are always popular and parents love to see the children enjoying themselves."

Over the years, the school have put on concerts such as Joseph and the amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Flashback to the Future (based on Back to the Future), and An Abba Spectacular.

Its early days were, however, far more modest. It all started when the company's founder, Steve Mansfield then aged 19, was approached by a teacher at Shobnall Primary School.

He said: "They were in a mess and needed a pianist to accompany the children in their harvest festival celebrations, I willingly obliged and left the school quite happily with a tenner stuffed in my pocket.

Concerts have been held in Hill Street Baptist Church, Swadlincote

"A few weeks later the head teacher at the time, Peter Mayne, approached me asking if I would like to go into the school on a regular basis. Initially this was for a couple of hours in the morning. I now work there for a full day - this is something I have now done for 25 years."

From then it snowballed as news of his talents spread like wildfire across Burton and South Derbyshire, Soon, schools were speaking to each other and Steve regularly received phone calls and was then taken on by Lansdowne Infants School and Fairmeadows Primary School in Newhall.

"At this time I also approached Newhall Junior School asking whether they would be interested in offering keyboard and piano lessons in school – the head teacher, Phil Collier said 'that sounds like a goer'. The popularity of this at the time was astonishing – I ended up teaching for three mornings a week."

Thousands of children have passed through the Excel Music School

Instrumental tuition on brass, woodwind and strings has always been very popular in schools. However, at this time there was no provision for allowing students to have lessons on both piano and electronic keyboard, and the music school seized on this opportunity and started providing electronic keyboard lessons in several local schools.

It now offers instrumental tuition for beginners and upwards on: pianoforte / keyboards, clarinet, flute, trumpet/cornet, recorder, saxophone, percussion, singing.

2004 proved the turning point. More schools were asking for his services and he decided to take on several instrumental teachers to create a carbon copy of what he was offering.

He said: "The business model was tried and tested and I was confident that it would work. Everyone that has had an input into Excel’s success is to be thanked, however small a contribution they have made."

Steve Mansfield had a chance meeting with a teacher in Burton which led to the founding of Excel Music School

Schools visited by Excel are now as far north as Stoke and as far south as Tamworth, and it now has contact with more than 1,000 students per week.

Steve has also taken his school viral, becoming an internet hit with his musical advent calendar. He raised more than £2,400 for Pancreatic Cancer Research Fund in memory of his father. Dave Mansfield was an active member of the community up to his death in April 2012, aged 66.

He was finance director for The Old Post Centre, in High Street, Newhall, founder trustee of the South Derbyshire Organ Trust, treasurer for Swadlincote Messiah Choral Society, and was also a governor at various schools.

He also helped set up Friends of Newhall Park, was treasurer to Hill Street Church, in Swadlincote, as well as treasurer at 1st Gresley Scouts in the 1980s and 1990s. Mr Mansfield also helped set up the Derbyshire Music Service in the 1990s.

The school has showcased performances for schools pictured here

Steve said: "My Dad was a big part of Excel until he sadly passed away in 2012. He always tried to keep my feet firmly on the ground and his accounting skills came into action on many occasions – balancing the books and making sense of bits of paper I threw at him! Now my wife Gill, financial director at Burton based Mid-Anglia engineering, has taken the mantle of Excel’s financial director. Without Dad or Gill I’d have never done it – teamwork all the way.

"I’ve never underestimated the power of networking – this is what has made the business what it is today."