What happened in this sector is really quite interesting. Pre-pandemic it was a sector which relied on groups of children, face to face to deliver the classes and courses.
This is a sector you would think would be the worst hit when lock down hit.
Showing the power of being part of franchise network, as the threat of lockdown approached, many were preparing to move classes online – which was easier if they had a software system to support this.
One the initial success stories were the take up of these online courses as customers wanted to continue to entertain and educate their children through the first lockdown.
So, in this sector, and whilst there was a significant drop in income in April 20, it was not the catastrophic drop we saw in the Job based sectors.
| Classes Growth % | Attendance Growth % | Value Growth % | |
|
Jan-21 vs Jan 20 |
-39.35 |
-56.36 |
-4.06 |
| Feb-21 vs Feb 20 |
-5.28 |
-40.21 |
-7.49 |
| Mar-21 vs Mar 20 |
-5.55 |
1.58 |
3.33 |
| Apr-21 vs Apr 20 |
23.75 |
60.33 |
6.49 |
| May-21 vs May 20 |
90.77 |
203.67 |
33.45 |
What we can also see (again unlike Job based sectors) is that the trend in the lockdown periods is a slow drop in the numbers as customers tire of Zoom sessions with peaks in bookings as we expect to come out of lockdowns such as we see in May 21
So in summary – Job Based sectors were much more severely affected at the start, but rapidly recovered to operating at near normal levels. However Children’s Activity based networks were initially less affected financially (because of their rapid switch to Zoom ), but have not recovered yet, so overall the financial effects on this sector have been much more significant.
One good thing is that we can see the demand is there. The spike traffic and bookings when the Roadmap dates were released is testament to that and the number of classes that were scheduled to run in May 21 and onwards is the most we’ve ever seen.
