About the school

Seventeen years above a picture framer's on Cobbler's Row.

Brightpath is an independent language school for adults. We are not a chain, not a franchise and not a college department. We are nine teachers, two office staff, five classrooms and a lending library, and we have been doing more or less the same thing since 2009.

How we started Who works here

Founded 2009
Six languages
~30 groups a term
Adults only

How it started

Two Spanish groups and a borrowed projector

Brightpath opened in September 2009 with a single rented room, two Spanish groups totalling eleven learners, and a projector borrowed indefinitely from somebody's brother-in-law. The school was founded by Elena Vargas and by Hannah Brightwell, who ran the office for the first nine years and whose surname is half of ours. The other half is not a metaphor about learning; it is the name of the path that runs behind the building down to the canal.

The first two years were not comfortable. Adult evening classes are a slow business to build, because the only marketing that reliably works is a learner telling a colleague at lunch, and that takes a term to happen and another term to arrive. We survived on the fact that the rent was cheap, the landlord was patient, and both founders had other work in the daytime.

French started in 2011, German in 2012, Italian in 2014 and Portuguese in 2021, each one because enough people had asked. We took over the second floor in 2013 and the first floor in 2017, which is how a school that began in one room came to have five classrooms, a library and a kitchen with a kettle that has outlasted three ovens.

What has not changed is the shape of the thing. Small groups. One evening a week. Ten-week terms. Adults who have already done a day's work before they arrive. Every time we have been tempted to grow in a different direction — larger classes, a children's programme, a franchise in the next town — we have looked at the numbers, looked at each other, and quietly not done it.

We are now around thirty groups a term across six languages, plus a set of online groups that run on the same syllabus for people who cannot get to Cobbler's Row on a weeknight. Roughly nine hundred adults have taken at least one full course with us, and a little over a hundred have taken more than six.

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Milestones

Seventeen years, abbreviated

Most of what a small school does is invisible and repetitive: enrol people, teach them well, ask them to come back. These are the few dates that changed something.

2013

The whole second floor

The design studio moves out and we take the lease on the entire floor: three classrooms, an office and the kitchen. For the first time the school has a front door of its own, a noticeboard, and somewhere for a learner to stand and read it while waiting for a lesson to start.

The eight-learner cap is written down for the first time this year, mostly so that nobody — including us — could be tempted to break it during a good September. It has been broken exactly twice since, both times to nine, both times with the whole group asked first and agreeing.

2016

The workplace courses

Ines Hartmann arrives from six years in corporate training and brings German for Work with her. It is the first course we build around a specific need rather than a level, and it changes how we think about syllabus design: the grammar is still there, but it turns up when a learner needs it to get through a phone call.

It also teaches us that adults will happily do harder homework if they can see the Tuesday morning it is for. Learners on the workplace courses complete about a third more written work than anyone else, and nobody has ever had to be chased for it.

2017

Downstairs, and step-free

The first floor becomes available and we take Rooms 1 and 2, reception and an accessible toilet at street level. Before this, a learner who could not manage stairs simply could not study here, and we had turned four people away in three years for exactly that reason.

There is still no lift to the upper floors and we are still honest about that on every page that mentions the building. But from this point on any learner who needs a ground-floor room gets one, every term, without having to make a case for it or explain why.

What we think

Six opinions we have not changed our minds about

None of these is original. All of them have cost us money at some point, which is roughly how you know somebody means them.

Twenty minutes beats two hours

We set homework that takes about twenty minutes a day, four days a week, and we mean the figure rather than using it as an aspiration. A task that takes an hour does not get done by people with jobs.

Undone homework does more harm than no homework at all, because it makes somebody quietly decide they are the sort of person who falls behind, and that decision is much harder to undo than a missed exercise. If a task of ours takes you more than half an hour, we have judged it badly and we want to be told.

Everybody teaches

Nobody here has a job title that keeps them out of a classroom. The head of teaching takes the beginners' groups. The person who coordinates placement teaches Monday nights. The two of us who own the company are both in front of a class every week of term.

It keeps the timetable honest, because nobody is scheduling an evening they will not have to teach. It also means that decisions about the school are made by people who will be living inside them on Wednesday at a quarter past six.

The people

Who you will actually meet

Nine teachers, six of whom have been here more than four years, and two office staff who between them know every learner's name and most of their reasons for coming. All teachers hold a recognised qualification for the language they teach, and all of them are in a classroom every week.

Elena Vargas

Co-founder · Spanish · Head of teaching

Elena taught secondary school in Valladolid for eight years before moving to Riverbourne, and has been here since the first evening in 2009. She takes the beginners' groups on principle: the first ten weeks decide whether somebody carries on, and she is unusually good at making a silent room speak.

She writes most of our in-house grammar sheets, does the final read of every syllabus before a term starts, and observes each teacher twice a year. She is also the person who says no to growth ideas, which is a job somebody has to do.

Monday 18:15 and Wednesday 19:45, in the building.

Sarah Whitcombe

English · Placement coordinator · Since 2013

Sarah has worked with adult learners for over twenty years, most of it with people who already speak English competently but do not yet enjoy it. She runs placement for the whole school, which means she has had roughly two thousand twenty-minute conversations with nervous strangers.

She is the person who will most likely do yours, and she is entirely aware that you are dreading it. Nobody has ever failed a placement conversation, because it is not a test of you; it is a test of which room you will enjoy being in on a Thursday.

Monday 19:45. Placement appointments Tuesday and Thursday afternoons.

Rui Amaral

Portuguese · Online coordinator · Since 2021

Rui teaches the only Portuguese groups in this part of town and has built them from four learners to nineteen. He is meticulous about pronunciation in the first three weeks and relaxed about almost everything afterwards, on the theory that the vowels will not fix themselves later but the vocabulary will.

He also looks after the online timetable and runs the free fifteen-minute connection check we offer in the week before every term. Ask him about the difference between European and Brazilian usage only if you have twenty minutes to spare.

Wednesday 18:15 in the building; Tuesday and Thursday 19:00 online.

Joyce Odusanya

Office manager · Since 2018

Joyce runs reception, enrolment, invoicing and the waiting lists, and is the reason the timetable on the entrance-hall board is always right when the website is not. If you telephone the school between four o'clock and half past eight, you are speaking to Joyce.

She also handles anything to do with personal information — requests to see a file, corrections, deletions — and she keeps the second-hand coursebook shelf stocked without ever telling anybody who donated what. Giulia Fontana, Dev Prakash and the three Saturday teachers are all introduced on the noticeboard in the hall.

Reception, Monday to Thursday afternoons and evenings.

Giulia Fontana teaches the Italian groups on Thursday evenings and Saturday mornings, and organises the November film evening. Dev Prakash covers Saturday reception. Three further teachers cover Spanish, French and Italian across the Saturday timetable and provide cover during term; we introduce cover teachers by name in the weekly summary email rather than letting a stranger walk into your room.

The building

What is behind the blue door

The Old Print Works was a jobbing printer's from 1911 to 1988 and a warehouse for most of the nineties. The ground floor is still a picture framer's shop. We have the first and second floors, and the entrance is the blue door on the side of the building rather than the shopfront — which catches out almost every first-time visitor, so look for the yellow sign.

Rooms and what they are used for Room numbers occasionally change between terms; the board in the entrance hall is always right.
Room	Floor	Seats	Typically used for
Room 1	Ground	10	German groups; any group that needs step-free access
Room 2	Ground	10	Spanish groups; the radiator that sounds like a kettle
Room 3	First	9	Italian groups and the Saturday travel course
Room 4	First	9	French and English groups
Room 5	First	8	Portuguese; pairs and individual tuition
Library	First	7	Reading Circle; quiet study before class
Studio	Second	2	Online teaching; recording the lesson library
Kitchen	Ground	—	Tea, coffee, a fridge, an honesty box, biscuits restocked Mondays

How the school works

Where a course fee goes

People occasionally ask why a ten-week course costs £265 when a term of night classes at a large college costs less. The honest answer is class size: eight learners paying £265 is £2,120 to run one group for seventeen and a half contact hours, and a good deal of that is spent before anybody walks into the room.

We publish the rough split below because we would rather be dull and clear than mysterious. The figures are averages across a term, rounded, and they do not add up to a fortune for anyone.

Approximate split of a standard group course fee Averaged across Term 3 of last year.
Where it goes	Share
Teaching hours, preparation and marking	52%
Rent, heating, lighting and cleaning	19%
Office staff and administration	13%
Materials, printing and the library	6%
Insurance, accounting and software	5%
Half-price and hardship places	3%
Retained by the school	2%

Teachers are paid for preparation and marking as well as contact time, which is less common in this sector than it ought to be, and is the main reason our hourly rate is what it is.

Outside the timetable

Things that happen anyway

None of the following is part of any course, none of it costs anything, and all of it exists because a learner suggested it and nobody could think of a reason to say no.

The conversation tables

Every Saturday in term time, 13:30 to 14:30, in the kitchen: one table per language if there are enough people, no teacher, no structure and no correction. There is also an online version on Wednesday evenings for forty-five minutes, run the same way.

Both are free and open to anybody who has ever enrolled with us, including several people who last took a course in 2014 and never quite stopped coming. It is the single cheapest thing we do and probably the one with the best return.

And the between-terms pack

A short optional pack goes out by email in the four-week gap between terms: a few articles, a listening list and one page of revision, plus — for online learners — a pointer to three or four recordings worth watching again. It exists because the gap is where progress most often leaks away. Fifteen minutes a week is enough to stop it, and about two-thirds of learners open the thing.

Questions about the school itself

Things people ask that are not about courses

Are you part of a larger group or chain?

No. Brightpath is a private limited company owned by the two people who run it, with no outside investors, no parent company, no franchise agreements and no relationship of any kind with any other school. Nobody has ever offered to buy us, which we choose to interpret as a compliment about our finances rather than the reverse.

It matters mostly in one practical way: there is nobody above us to appeal to and nobody above us to blame. If something about the school is wrong, the person who can change it is standing at reception on a Wednesday evening.

Are your courses accredited, and will I get a certificate?

Our own courses are not externally accredited, and we say so plainly rather than implying otherwise with a logo in the footer. At the end of each term every learner receives a written feedback report and a certificate of attendance stating the language, level and hours completed.

If you need a recognised external qualification — for a visa, a university application or an employer who insists on one — we can prepare you for the common public examinations and point you at the nearest registered test centre. We are not one ourselves and we do not take entries.

Is there anything you are actually bad at?

Two things, consistently, in seventeen years of feedback forms. The building is cold in January until about half past six, because a Victorian print works with single glazing warms up slowly and we have not yet found an affordable answer that the landlord will agree to.

And we are slow at replying to email during the first fortnight of a term, when enrolment, placement and teaching all land in the same week; replies can take two or three working days in mid-September. Both are on the list. Neither is fixed. If something is urgent, say so in the subject line and it goes to the top of the pile.

If your question is about a course, the timetable or fees, it is probably answered on the home page. If it is about what we do with your details, see the privacy notice. If it is about neither, ring the office and ask.

Next step

Come and see the place

You can sit in on one session of any group that has space, free of charge, as an observer or a participant. Ring the office to arrange it, because we like to warn the teacher and it is unfair to arrive unannounced into a small room.

Contact the office This term's courses Online classes