Ballsbridge College of Further Education

There’s guaranteed to be a mob scene on registration night in Ballsbridge College of Further Education.
It’s understandable.
Here self-​improvement is a thriving business, with an incredible menu of day and evening courses on offer throughout the year. Sharpen your sketching skills, develop your pen with Creative Writing Courses (ahem), become a better you with an Assertiveness course, get your technical skills up to scratch or take a language… or three.
There’s plenty of space for everyone, too. This building is huge –layers built and added on to each other to create this impressive feat of compact spaciousness in the heart of Ballsbridge’s main thoroughfare.
My winter Yoga class (intensely satisfying and suited for beginners/​mid-​level practioners, highly recommended) was a calming affair held in huge classroom that, while at the back of the building, never seemed cold.
Best of all, BCoFE has unbelievably affordable rates. Example: the Sunday Times lauded Interior Design course is just € 120… for TEN weeks!
Here’s the catch: everyone else knows how great this is, too. They want to get onto those courses just as badly as you do. There’s just a few days of enrollment (in person, no mail-​ins) and competition for is fierce.
My advice: pack a thermos of coffee, bring a folding chair, camp out by the doors and once they open… RUN.

The Ballsbridge College of Further Education offers full-​time courses and evening-​courses in many practically oriented subjects and their courses are FETAC certified.
Now, this college has a reputation of being something of a last chance saloon for those who couldn’t be arsed with the chaotic maelstrom of fact-​based rote-​learning that is the Irish Leaving Certificate. Not so, the practical nature and career oriented focus of the courses here are ideal for targeting specific career paths. In fact, the most successful graduate that I know, came directly from the Ballsbridge College.
Ballsbridge College, just going to show that the Leaving isn’t everything.