After getting some feedback on how people want to learn to skate we've decided to do a big change in our courses. Obviously we cannot please all of the people all of the time, but we hope that most of you will find these new courses far more interesting and useful to yourselves.

The first change is that we've decided to extend the Sunday Beginners, the FREE drop-in session (if you have bought your skates from Club Blue Room and still have the receipt), by adding a follow-on hour long course: Sunday Beginners Follow-on.

This new course takes you through the next few steps for getting your skating and costs only £20.00. You can attend it whenever you'd like, whether or not you have done the Sunday Beginners session before hand.

From the first Sunday in May (4th), we'll be moving the time of the Sunday Beginners course from 13:00 to 12:00. This is being done to make room for some more courses we're planning to run on Sunday afternoons.

We were a little surprised by the feedback we received but it seems that after you've got past these skills you then like to learn specific areas of skating. So, we've brought in a couple of courses that focus on individual parts of skating:

Our 4 ways to stop in 2 hours covers stopping without using a heel brake, and 3 ways to turn in 2 hours introduces different types of turns.

And when you're comfortable going forwards, why not try out our 2 hours of backwards course, where you'll learn to transition to backwards, skate a bit, and turn corners. From there you could go on and try 2 ways to stop backwards.

We are working on putting together a course that will take you from beginner to street skater, so you can get out on the Sunday Stroll and we'll, hopefully, be announcing something extra special about that course in the near future.

We've been working hard over the winter period to prepare ourselves for the new summer season. New lessons; a new look, both for this web site and our instructors in the park; and we've added online booking of group lessons, an Atom feed, and a Facebook Group.

We've recruited a few new instructors:

• David Whitehead, of Club Blue Room, joins us to take on our more advanced courses.
• Matthew Denner teaches our weekday afternoon and group sessions, and takes over the skateinstructor.com website.

We hope that all of these changes will help you enjoy both your skating experience and make it easier for you to interact with us. We think the website is pretty cool: do you like it? You can always provide feedback by contacting us.

Inline skating is an extreme sport and injuries can occur. Normally these are minor falls and usually involve more of a bruised ego! However, there is a chance that serious injury can occur and we strongly recommend that you do everything possible to protect yourself. Thousands of students have passed through our courses and injuries have, thankfully, been extremely rare but that does not negate the chance of it happening.

With this in mind, and a desire to make our teaching environment as safe as possible, we have decided to change our safety policy. The key change to our policy is that we now require all students to wear knee, wrist and elbow pads and a helmet. You should familiarise yourself with our safety policy, especially if you are a new student.

We have, in the past, had students attempt to debate our safety policy. We hope that you understand that we are doing this for your safety and so the topic is not open for negotiation.

If you have any questions regarding this policy change you are more than welcome to contact us.

skateinstructor.com and SkateFresh will be making an unforgettable skating trip to Paris, to skate the famous Friday night Pari-Roller skate and enjoy a weekend of skating in one of the world's most skateable cities.