Study Plans

Maya's kitchen table, the next evening

The warning turned out to be a low-balance alert — nothing fatal, but enough to scare her. If she wanted a better-paid job, Maya decided, she needed new skills.

So she signed up to take part in an evening English class. She was tired, but for once that felt like a good kind of tired.

The classroom, 8pm, after a long shift

By eight o'clock her eyes were closing. The teacher wrote a word on the board that Maya had never seen, and her brain just stopped.

She took a breath and carried on. Whenever she came across a new word, she'd look it up straight away.

Sam: Week by week, you're really making progress — honestly, it shows at work too.