Why We Keep Our Digital Skills Cohorts Small

Our digital skills class runs on a handful of borrowed and donated laptops, which naturally limits how many participants we can accept at once. We've deliberately chosen to keep cohorts small rather than stretch our limited equipment across more participants than it can genuinely serve.

The Trade-Off We're Making Explicitly

A larger cohort would let more young people say they'd attended the class. It would also mean less actual keyboard time per participant, and less individual attention when someone gets stuck. We've chosen depth over breadth, even though it means a waiting list we're not entirely comfortable with.

What a Small Cohort Actually Enables

With a small group, a facilitator can notice quickly when a participant is struggling with a specific step, typing, navigating a document, setting up an email account, and address it before the participant falls behind the rest of the group and disengages.

Why We Didn't Just Ask for More Laptops Upfront

We could, in principle, seek a larger laptop donation to run bigger cohorts immediately. We've been cautious about doing this before proving the current small-cohort model actually works well, since we'd rather demonstrate a sound approach at a small scale before asking for the resources to expand it.

How We Manage the Waiting List

Participants are added to a waiting list in the order they express interest, and we're honest with them about the likely wait, rather than implying a shorter timeline than we can actually deliver. We've found this honesty, even when the answer is a wait of a few months, is better received than vague reassurance.

What We'd Do With More Equipment

If we secured more reliable laptops, even older, secondhand ones, we would run additional small cohorts in parallel rather than simply making existing cohorts larger, preserving the same hands-on ratio we think makes the class effective.

Why This Reflects a Broader Pattern in Our Work

This mirrors how we've approached other programmes, our table-banking groundwork and our economic support training, prioritising doing a smaller thing well over a larger thing thinly. We think this consistency matters more than any single programme's specific scale.

What Participants Have Told Us About the Small Format

Several participants have specifically mentioned appreciating that a facilitator could sit with them individually when they got stuck, something they doubted would have happened in a larger, busier classroom setting. We think that specific, repeated feedback is a stronger signal than attendance numbers alone that the small-cohort approach is serving participants well.

How We'll Know When It's Time to Expand

We're not treating the current cohort size as permanent. If we secure additional reliable equipment and confirm we have facilitator capacity to run a genuinely well-supported second parallel cohort, rather than simply a larger single one, we'd consider that the right moment to grow, rather than expanding based on waiting-list pressure alone.

Why We're Comfortable With a Waiting List for Now

A waiting list is not a comfortable thing to maintain, and we recognise it means some young people wait longer than we'd like for a chance to build these skills. We accept that discomfort as the honest cost of prioritising quality of instruction over speed of throughput, at least until our resources genuinely allow both.

What We'd Say to a Young Person Currently Waiting

We try to stay in touch with participants on the waiting list rather than letting them simply wait in silence, sharing an honest estimate of timing when we have one and letting them know when a spot opens. It's a small courtesy, but one we think matters to someone who's already shown genuine interest.

A Final Honest Note

We don't love having a waiting list, and we'd change it if we could do so without compromising the quality of the class itself. Until we can expand responsibly, with the right equipment and facilitator capacity in place, we think this is the more honest trade-off to make, even though it means asking some young people to wait longer than any of us would prefer.

What This Taught Us About Resisting Pressure to Scale Quickly

Early interest in the class grew faster than we expected, and there was real pressure, mostly self-imposed, to expand quickly to meet it. Resisting that pressure and sticking with small, well-supported cohorts has been one of the more deliberate discipline decisions we've made as an organisation.