About
Teaching people to code above the quay since 2017
Brackwell began as an evening class for eight people around one table. It is still small on purpose.
Why a school this size
Ruth Adeyemi started Brackwell in 2017 after interviewing a run of junior developers who could recite frameworks but had never shipped anything with a real user. The first class met on Tuesday evenings in a borrowed room above a chandlery on the quay, eight people and one shared projector.
The full-time course followed in 2019, and live-online in 2020, when the room had to close and the cohort refused to stop. Online students never went away: about a third of every cohort now joins on a video call and pairs with someone in the studio every week.
We have taught 640 people since. The things that work have stayed the same: small rooms, mentors who still do the job, and projects for real clients in the last three weeks.
What we will not change
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Small rooms
Cohorts stop at 16. Past that, the quiet student at the back stops asking questions.
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Working mentors
Every mentor ships code for clients two days a month, so what we teach is what the job is this year.
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Honest numbers
We publish our outcomes with the misses in, and we never promise a job.
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Local first
Client projects come from Southampton charities and businesses, and demo day is in the room with the people who hire.
The people in the room
Every cohort has two mentors with it all day, plus the careers coach from week ten.
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Ruth Adeyemi
Head of curriculum
Eleven years building booking systems for ferry and travel companies. Writes most of the project briefs.
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Callum Hart
Lead mentor, full-time
Former secondary computing teacher, then six years as a front-end developer at an agency.
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Mei Lin Ostrowski
Lead mentor, part-time
Back-end developer for health software; teaches the evenings because she learned in them.
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Jonah Pryce
Careers coach
Ten years in technical recruitment. Runs the mock interviews and knows every local hiring manager.
Come and see the studio
Open evenings run on the first Wednesday of every month, 6:30 to 8pm. Sit in on a session, meet a mentor and ask a graduate anything.
27 Tallow Quay, Southampton ZZ14 2BC Book an open evening
The room you'll learn in
Two teaching rooms, a quiet room for calls and interviews, and a kitchen that is mostly toast. Desks have two monitors each, and loan laptops are ready on day one for anyone who needs one.
