How big should a puppy class be?

Six to eight puppies, with one instructor. Go to ten only when you have a second person in the room whose job is the humans, not the dogs.

The number gets argued as a dog-welfare question and it is really a teaching question. Puppies do not need much from you individually in the first two weeks. Their owners need everything, and an owner who cannot hear the instruction, cannot see the demonstration, or is too embarrassed to ask in front of eleven strangers goes home and does none of it. That is the real failure of a big class, and it shows up six weeks later as a graduate who still jumps on visitors.

Count handlers, not puppies

The arithmetic worth doing is minutes of attention per handler.

A sixty-minute class is not sixty minutes of coaching. Take off ten for arrivals and settling, ten for the week's demonstration, and five at the end for questions and the next week's homework. That leaves about thirty-five minutes of floor time. Split across six families it is under six minutes each. Split across twelve it is under three.

Three minutes is not enough to watch somebody's timing, correct their lure, and see them do it right once. So a class of twelve is not a class of six run twice as efficiently. It is a different product, and if you charge the same for it you are charging the same for half the coaching.

The floor is real too. A puppy that cannot get four or five metres from the next puppy has nowhere to go when it is overwhelmed, and the class turns into management rather than training.

This is also why the answer to a waiting list is a second intake rather than a bigger one. Two classes of six at the same price bring in the same revenue per hour as one class of twelve, and the second one is easier to teach, easier to review well, and refills itself because the families in it tell other families.

The intake that fills is not the class that works

Two things push operators past their own number, and both feel reasonable at the time.

The first is the family who rings on the Friday before it starts. One more will not hurt, and it usually does not, and then it is nine next term because nine was fine. Write the number down and treat it as the number rather than the starting point.

The second is the two-puppy household. They are one enquiry, one phone call and one invoice, so they feel like one enrolment. They are two puppies on your floor and they take two places, and they are harder work than two unrelated puppies because they have each other to look at instead of you.

If your real constraint is families, set the template number to the puppy count that comes with the families you can coach. Six families with one litter-mate pair between them is seven puppies, and seven is the number to type.

Set the class size where the booking form holds it

Class size lives on the course template, and the number you set there is the cap enrolment respects.

1. Open Courses, select Manage on the course, then Manage Template.
2. On Course Structure, set Maximum Capacity to your number.
3. Select Publish Changes, tick the box in Before You Publish, then select Publish Changes.
4. Open Resources and select Manage on the room you publish the course into.
5. On Capacity, set Pets at a Time to at least the class size.
6. Select Publish Changes, tick the box in Before You Publish, then select Publish Changes.

Creating your first course template walks through the template and the publishing step.

The trap that catches most people is the second cap. Your resource, the room or space you publish the course into, carries its own capacity, and Petboost takes the lower of the two. A template set to eight published into a training room left at 1 gives you a capacity error the first time you try to enrol a second puppy. Raise the resource to match the class before you blame the template.

Once that is right, the enrolment path holds the line for you. A course with no places left stops appearing as an option, so nobody can quietly make it nine.

There is one more control worth knowing for puppy school specifically. An attendance cap sits on an attribute rather than the class, and it limits how many puppies carrying that badge can be in the same class at once. Cap the under-ten-week puppies, or the ones you have marked as nervous, and Petboost checks every session before it accepts an enrolment. If one lesson would go over, the enrolment is refused rather than half-accepted.

Before you act: class sizes, supervision ratios and vaccination requirements for young puppies are set by your state or territory, your insurer and often your venue. This is general information rather than regulatory or veterinary advice. Check your own requirements before you change your class size.