Almudena and Claudia, two childhood friends from Southern Spain, set up Bilingual Beats in October 2013. Bilingual Beats provides music language classes to children in London schools and nurseries, as well as hosting parties and family classes. Their aim is to teach children languages in an entertaining way at this crucial formative stage of their development and learning.
Before setting up Bilingual Beats, Almudena was a music teacher in her native Spain, where she taught teenagers at an English bilingual school. She enjoyed her job, but wanted to work in another country and also wanted to work with children rather than teenagers. Almudena believes that babies and young children are at the optimum age to start learning languages and knew that a London audience would be open to early learning opportunities.
When Almudena’s husband wanted to move to London in 2013, she and Claudia saw this as the perfect opportunity to set up their own company, where Almudena could have the freedom to teach how she wanted to. Almudena and Claudia decided to seize the opportunity and set up Bilingual Beats.
It was a good decision and since its inception things have gone very well for Bilingual beats. They employ a manager and various teachers and musicians to carry out their exciting lessons to a host of regular clients.
The business is growing online as well with a popular YouTube channel, whilst their songs are available both on iTunes and Spotify. They are also delving into the growing apps market with videos and games to help people practice their French and Spanish.
Their business has proved very popular and received glowing testimonials:
“Warm, engaging, exuberant teacher and musicians made this class my little girl’s favourite for the two years that we’ve been attending. I asked her to count to ten the other day, she did – in Spanish!”
Things have gone smoothly for the business, but there have been some challenges – marketing the business can be difficult in London where there are so many other educational businesses. Furthermore, both Almudena and Claudia coincidentally gave birth in 2015, both subsequently taking maternity leave at a similar time. This meant that the pair have had to juggle the business with bringing up children, which has been another challenge.
They are now able to spend more time with the business though and have great ambitions for Bilingual Beats. The business currently works all across London and Almudena would love to spread it further, starting up in other cities across the UK with the ultimate aim to take Bilingual Beats around round the world.
