Two years of afternoon groups that lost half their students by week five, and the reason it had nothing to do with commitment.
For two years the ladies programme ran in the afternoon. Both years it started full and both years about half the room had stopped coming by week five, and the women who stopped apologised for it, which is the part that eventually made us look properly.
The reason was not commitment and it was not the teaching. Children come home in the afternoon. A programme that sits on top of that asks a woman to choose between it and her house every single week, and she loses that argument every week whatever she wants to do. Then she feels bad and stops, and the academy writes it down as a student who did not continue.
So Ustadha Sheereen proposed mornings and we argued about it, because mornings are when the office is busiest and when the hall is used for other things. She was right and the attendance settled it: three mornings a week between eight and half past ten, sixteen weeks, and the room stays close to full to the end of the term.
Two other things came out of the change. A later morning group at a quarter to ten now exists for mothers doing the school run, because the eight o'clock start is impossible if you are dropping children off. And the mat at the back happened by itself, when three students brought children under school age and nobody minded. That is now a standing arrangement, with one honest limitation: there is nobody here to look after them. A mother who spends the morning in the corridor with a restless child has not really attended, and it is better to know that before the intake than in week three.
The men's programme stayed in the evening for the mirror image of the same reason. Nobody here believes there is one right hour to teach at. There is the hour the people you are teaching can actually attend.