Updates to Workshop Pricing & Course Deferral Policies

Like many small arts organisations, we’re doing better now than we were immediately post-pandemic, but we’re still far from where we need to be in order to thrive and effectively plan for the future.

As such, we’ve had to take a close look at aspects how we operate to make sure we can continue offering high-quality training for years to come.

Our biggest challenge on the education front remains uncertainty about course enrolment numbers – whether courses will have enough bookings to hit minimum viable numbers, and whether they’ll stay viable after they’ve launched.

With that in mind, we’re making a few updates to our workshop pricing and booking policies to further incentivise early registrations, and disincentivise last-minute course deferrals.

The headlines are:

• Pricing will stay stable for students who book early and consistently, and increase modestly for others

• Friends and family referral rewards have doubled

• We are no longer able to offer internal credit for course deferrals once the workshop start date rolls around, and future deferral credits will have a 1-year expiry

• There’s a discount offer down below that effectively reopens the now-closed early bird window for Term 3 courses, through the end of this Friday

As always, you can reference our full list of course policies at any time.

Updated Pricing (with better rewards for early booking)

From next term, our standard pricing will increase by $50 to:

• Full Price: $625 inc. GST

• Concession / Full-Time Student: $575 inc. GST

We’re also expanding our early booking incentives so that planning ahead is more rewarding than ever:

• Early Bird (4+ weeks out):

  • Full Price → $575

  • Concession → $550

• Double Early Bird (for current students continuing on to the very next term, no breaks):

  • $525 for everyone

    • This was the previous “best price” for upper-level classes and remains so today

• Extra Early Bird Bonuses:

  • Additional student tickets and jam passes to use during term

    • Tickets: 4 → 5

    • Jam passes: 1 → 2

This structure allows us to better support committed students while encouraging earlier enrolments, which helps us plan classes and staffing more effectively.

You can check out our new course pricing page for the latest information at any time.

✨ We’re aware that the early bird window for Term 3 classes has already passed, read on below for a discount offer that reopens the window open for a few more days

Bigger Referral Rewards

We’ve also doubled our referral program:

• Earn a course voucher up to $100 when a friend signs up to one of our 8-week intro courses after using your referral link or code

  • These previously topped out at $50

Please check the My Account section of the website for information on this program.

Changes to Course Deferral Policies & Fees

We’re updating our course deferral policy to strike a better balance between flexibility for students and certainty for our team.

What’s becoming more flexible:

• Free transfers and deferrals are now available up to 7 days before your course starts

  • Previously 14 days – we’re eliminating fees within the 7-14 day window

What’s becoming stricter:

• Deferral vouchers are no longer available within 3 hours of the first class session, or after a course has started

  • Strictly no credit will be offered after this window – we ask that students think carefully about possible conflicts before committing to a course, and defer well and truly in advance if a booked course no longer suits their schedule

  • Once a class has launched, we ask that students attend as many sessions as possible to maximise value from their purchase

• When issued ahead of a course's start date, deferral vouchers will now have a 1-year expiry

Why this change?

In recent years, we’ve seen a growing pattern of last-minute deferrals — often due to relatively minor conflicts popping up with a handful of the booked course sessions.

While completely understandable on an individual level, it makes it very difficult for us to fill classes and plan effectively when over a dozen students defer each and every term after 1-2 sessions have taken place.

We make a final decision on whether to run a class or cancel it roughly 48 hours in advance, and deferrals after that decision has been made are extremely challenging for us, frequently pulling our classes back under minimum numbers – we would have cancelled or postponed the class ahead of time if we knew this was going to be the case.

Importantly, while we always encourage you to attend your class sessions when possible:

• You don’t need to attend every session to complete an elective course

• You can miss up to 2 out of 8 sessions and still be considered for a passing grade in our evaluated courses

These changes are designed to encourage students to stay enrolled and get the most out of their course, rather than deferring entirely for small disruptions or change-of-mind about the specific comedy discipline they’ve enrolled in.

Regarding that last point, it’s important to note that sketch comedy and stand-up comedy classes have weekly homework assignments – please plan ahead for this, as we can no longer support anyone deferring after they’ve failed to budget adequate time to do their writing assignments outside of class.

For classes with formal pass/repeat evaluations, we still offer discounts for students who are asked to repeat the level, including for attendance-related reasons. The discount is tied to the specific level you’ve repeated.

For our more popular classes, the new 3-hour cutoff also gives us a final opportunity to offer waitlisted students a chance to purchase the spot and make it into the city before class. At present, it is unfortunately all too common to see 6:25pm deferrals ahead of 6:30pm classes, effectively preventing anyone else from getting involved.

Special Offer for Current and Returning Students (This Week Only)

We know this update comes just after the early bird window for next term has closed.

To make things fair, we have some discount codes that current students (Term 2 enrolment) and returning students (any previous term enrolment) can use to get the relevant early bird price for an improv or sketch comedy course taking place in Term 3.

• Current students can use CURRENTSTUDENT to get an eligible class for $525

• Returning students can use RETURNINGSTUDENT to get an eligible class for $575 Full or $550 Concession

We hope to have all of our Term 3 teacher assignments finalised before this offer expires.

This bookings aren't technically early bird, so the website won't offer the bonus student tickets and jams now associated with true early bird bookings, but hopefully the general discount is enough of an incentive.

Offer available through 11:59pm this Friday 17 April