Ring us, email us, or walk in and ask.
There is no call centre, no ticket number and no chatbot. During reception hours the telephone is answered by Joyce or Dev, both of whom can tell you whether a group has a place left without having to look it up. Outside those hours the answering machine is checked every weekday morning.
- Answered by a person
- Email within 1 working day
- Walk-ins welcome
- No appointment needed
How to reach us
The office handles enrolment, fees, invoices, waiting lists, trial visits, room bookings and everything else that is not a lesson. Teachers do not have individual office telephones, and email to a teacher goes through the office during term because they are teaching in the evenings and would not otherwise see it until Friday.
We answer general email within one working day, except in the first fortnight of a term when enrolment, placement and teaching all land in the same week and it can stretch to two or three days. We are not going to pretend otherwise; it is on the short list of things we are genuinely bad at.
Which address to use
| If you want to | Write to | Usual reply |
|---|---|---|
| Ask anything at all about courses, places or the school | hello@ | 1 working day |
| Book a free placement chat, in person, by phone or online | placement@ | 2 working days |
| Query an invoice, request a purchase order reference or arrange instalments | accounts@ | 3 working days |
| Ask about an online group or arrange a connection check | hello@ | 1 working day |
| Make a complaint or raise something formally | hello@ | acknowledged in 2, answered in 10 |
| Ask what personal data we hold about you | hello@ | within one calendar month |
All addresses end in brightpath-language.example.com. We deliberately do not make a contact form the only route in: a small school should have an email address you can put in your own address book and a number you can ring.
Best times to ring, and what happens if you don't
The school is an evening operation, so the office keeps evening hours. Nobody is here at nine in the morning and the answering machine says so rather than pretending otherwise.
Saturday mornings
09:00 to 13:30, which is the only daytime slot we keep open all year. Dev is on reception, the Saturday groups are in the building, and it is the easiest time to look round without arranging anything in advance or feeling that you are interrupting a lesson.
The coffee is better on Saturdays and this is not a coincidence. The conversation tables run in the kitchen from 13:30 if you want to hear what a group actually sounds like.
If nobody answers
Leave a message with your name, your number and the language you are asking about. The machine is emptied every weekday morning and returned calls go out between 16:00 and 17:00, so you will usually hear back the same day you rang.
If you would rather not leave a message, email instead; it reaches the same two people and gets the same attention. We do not have a separate enquiries team, because there are only thirteen of us in total.
Fridays and Sundays
The building is closed and nobody is here. Email sent on a Friday is usually answered on Monday afternoon, and a message left on Friday evening will be picked up on Monday morning along with everything else from the weekend.
This is a real closure rather than a soft one: there is no out-of-hours number, no on-call rota and no expectation on any member of staff to check anything at the weekend. We think that is a reasonable way to run a school.
Send us a note
Three boxes, which is all we need in order to reply properly. Tell us the language you are interested in and roughly where you think your level is — or that you have no idea, which is a perfectly good answer and the one most people give. If you are asking about an online group, say so and we will include the connection-check dates.
We do not ask for a telephone number, a postcode, a date of birth or a marketing preference. If we need any of those we will ask in the reply, and only for what we actually need. Nothing you write here is used for marketing and nothing is shared with anybody.
Replies come from a person, usually within one working day. If you have not heard from us in three, please ring — occasionally a reply lands in a spam folder, and we would much rather you chased us than quietly assumed the group was full.
What to expect after you write
We reply with the groups that fit, honestly described as full, nearly full or wide open. If you need a placement we offer two or three appointment times. Nobody telephones you out of the blue, nobody adds you to a mailing list, and nobody follows up a week later to ask whether you have thought any more about it.
What we will probably ask you
- Which language, and whether you have studied it before.
- Roughly how long ago, and how it ended.
- Which evenings genuinely work for you in an ordinary week — not which ones you could force if you had to.
- Whether you would consider an online group if the in-person one is full.
- Whether there is anything we should know so that the room works for you.
Things you can ask us
- Whether a specific group has a place, and how many.
- How long the waiting list is and how much it has historically moved.
- Whether we think you are aiming too high or too low, which we will answer straight.
- What a lesson is actually like, or to sit in on one and find out for yourself.
- Anything about fees, instalments, employer invoices or the half-price places.
Prefer not to write at all?
Walk in. Between 16:00 and 20:30 on a teaching day there is somebody at reception, and standing in the entrance hall reading the noticeboard for ten minutes tells you more about a school than any website does, including this one.
Finding the blue door
The school occupies the upper two floors of a converted print works on the edge of the town centre, above a picture framer's shop. The entrance is not the shopfront. It is the blue door on the side of the building, in the short lane that runs down towards the canal path, and there is a yellow sign above it. This catches out almost every first-time visitor, including two of our own teachers on their first day.
Reception is immediately inside on the left. Rooms 1 and 2, the kitchen and the accessible toilet are on the same level. Rooms 3, 4, 5 and the library are up one flight of stairs; the studio where the online classes are taught is up another.
Getting here
- On foot: eight minutes from the market square, going north past the library. Cobbler's Row is the second turning on the left after the crossing.
- By bus: routes 4, 12 and 61 stop on the main road, a three-minute walk. Evening services run until about 22:30, and the last useful one back into town leaves at 22:10, comfortably after the final class ends.
- By car: eleven free spaces behind the building, entered from the lane rather than the shopfront, free to learners after 18:00. They go quickly on Wednesdays. On-street parking in the surrounding roads is unrestricted after 18:30.
- By bike: a covered rack for six bikes just inside the yard gate. If it is full you are welcome to wheel a bike into the ground-floor corridor; several people do this every week and nobody minds.
- By train: Riverbourne station is nineteen minutes on foot, or four stops on the 12.
If you arrive early
The building opens thirty minutes before the first class. The kitchen has tea, coffee, a fridge and an honesty box, and the library is a perfectly good place to sit with a book. Nobody will ask you why you are there.
Answers to the six things we are asked most
If one of these is your question, you have the answer now and do not need to wait a day for it.
Do you teach children or teenagers?
No. Every group is adults only, which for us means eighteen and over, and our teachers are trained and insured for adult teaching. This is not snobbery about young learners; mixed-age evening classes serve neither group well, and we would be doing both badly.
We are happy to recommend two local providers who do teach children, and reception keeps their current timetables. The one exception is that a seventeen-year-old may join an adult group in the term before their eighteenth birthday, with a parent's written agreement.
Will my employer be invoiced properly?
Yes. We issue a numbered invoice with a purchase order reference if you supply one, payment terms thirty days, and we can provide an attendance record at the end of the term. There is no minimum order and no contract is required for a single course.
If procurement needs a course outline, a teacher biography or written confirmation of public liability insurance, ask and we will send all three within the week. About a fifth of our workplace-course learners are funded this way and none of it has ever been complicated.
Classes begin Monday 14 September
Enrolment is open now. Most beginners' groups fill in the last fortnight of August, and the waiting lists start moving again in the first two weeks of term.