A flat lead and a normal collar or harness, your vaccination card, poo bags, and something soft your puppy already likes to lie on. Bring treats your puppy actually rates, cut small, and hold back their meal beforehand so they arrive hungry rather than full.

What not to bring: a retractable lead, a head collar, or a squeaky toy. And do not carry your puppy in from the car if you can walk them the last few minutes instead. A puppy who has been carried arrives at a much higher gear than one who has walked.

Tell us before week one and we will plan around it. A worried puppy does not get thrown in, and they do not sit in the corner missing out either. They work at the edge of the group with a trainer, and come in when they are ready rather than when the timetable says so.

Introductions happen one at a time in every class regardless, which is the main reason we do it that way. A free for all is where nervous puppies learn that other dogs are something to get away from.

The group class needs your puppy to have had their second vaccination, which in practice means starting between eleven and thirteen weeks so the four weeks finish by around sixteen weeks.

If your puppy is younger than that, nothing is on hold. The one to one work at your home and the online course both start immediately, and the weeks between eight and eleven are the ones where toileting, biting, crate training and settling are actually decided. Waiting for class to start is the single most common mistake we see.

Both of you should come, and we would rather you did. The single most common reason training fails at home is two people applying it differently, and an hour in the room together fixes more of that than any amount of explaining afterwards.

Kids are welcome and are genuinely useful, because your puppy has to learn to behave around them too. Old enough to follow an instruction is the only real requirement.

There are four levels and the current prices are all on the puppy school booking page, along with exactly what each one includes.

The four weeks of class are identical at every level. What you are choosing between is how much one to one time you get in your own home, how long you keep the online course, and how directly you can reach us afterwards. Most families land on the second level, which is where a session at home and the full course access switch on.

Graduation is the middle of the job, not the end of it. The four weeks cover the socialisation window. The next thing coming at you is adolescence, and that is where most owners get caught out.

You keep lifetime access to our community and to Ask Luke, our round the clock question service, with no message cap at any level. The online course carries on through the weeks that follow, and at the higher levels you still have sessions in the bank for when something new turns up at seven months.

Yes. The entry level is the four weeks of class plus a month inside the online course, and plenty of people start there.

Worth knowing what you are trading off. Class is one hour a week in a room. Everything that actually goes wrong happens at your front door, in your hallway and on your street, and that is what the session at home is for. If budget is the reason, start where you can and step up later rather than not starting.

You have missed the group class, not the boat. The class has to finish by around sixteen weeks because the puppies in it need to be close in age and size, and running it later would be going through the motions. Your socialisation window stays open until 6 months, so there is still real work to do.

From seventeen to thirty two weeks we run a different program that swaps the group class for more sessions in your own home, because what a teenage dog needs is different work rather than the same work late. Past thirty two weeks it is in home behaviour training. Both are on the site.

Yes, from the second level up. A trainer comes to your address and works on your setup, your routine and the behaviour that is actually happening where you live, which is almost never the same as what happens in a training room.

We cover Sydney within roughly a forty five minute drive of the Harbour Bridge. That takes in the eastern suburbs, inner west, lower and upper north shore, northern beaches, south Sydney and out through the inner west. Only the group class brings you to a venue.

Yes, and we would rather you did. The meet and greet is fifteen minutes, free, and there is nothing to sign at the end of it.

Bring the questions you feel silly asking. Most of what people are worried about at eight weeks is completely normal and takes about ninety seconds to answer, and knowing that before you spend anything is worth more to us than a booking made by someone who is not sure.