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Nicola’s Story
When Nicola was 15, she thought her natural confidence and sociability would carry
her through life. She certainly didn’t worry about doing well in her GCSEs. “I didn’t
care and I wasn’t interested. I just felt like having a laugh and was more interested
in having a smoke behind the drama studio. The result was I left school with just
a few low grade GCSEs,” she says.
She quickly found a job in a pub, loved it and ended up in bar management, thoroughly
enjoying that life for several years. Then she decided to start a family and was
made redundant, which was an immediate financial blow. But, she says, she was already
concerned that living above the “shop”, which she had to do in pub management, was
not the environment that she wanted to bring her children up in.
Nicolacame to rue the cavalier attitude to qualifications of her teenage self as
she realised she had ambitions to make more of her abilities with “something more
rewarding and more challenging.”
She was in the situation of many mothers of young children who have been out of the
workplace; she wass low in confidence, living on a tight income and has limited time
to call her own. Nicola was also disadvantaged by having little in the way of formal
achievements to demonstrate her capabilities.
It was thanks to the courses and career guidance provided by our FACE family and
community education programme that Nicola found the motivation, first to return to
learning and then to pursue it to a higher level.
“Without this opportunity I would have gone and got a cleaning job in a couple of
years. I wouldn’t have the confidence to push myself,” she says.
Nicola currently has a part-time job working in education and is still studying.
More about Nicola’s story...
