Pearse College CDVEC on Clogher Road, Dublin, started life as a second-level school for boys. Today it's a vibrant college of adult and further education. Most of its students, says admissions officer Dan Bradley, are in their twenties and thirties and have come back to avail of second chance education.

The college has 600 full-time students and offers a range of programmes including Junior Cert and Leaving Cert, PLCs, a university foundation course, a VTOS taster course and literacy programmes. To qualify for VTOS - you have to be 21 years of age or over and be in receipt of unemployment benefit or assistance, a lone parents allowance or a disability pension. This year the college is running a pilot programme aimed at enabling early school-leaving 18 to 21 year-olds who live in a designated partnership area to return to education and retain their benefits.

The good news is that you don't have to qualify for VTOS to be a mature student to Pearse College. All adults are welcome, says vice-principal Marie Oxx says. The Leaving Cert is good value too: a registration fee of £10 and £46 for the exams. The college also operates a creche which costs £7 for five mornings.

Last year, half of the college's Leaving Cert students got CAO offers, according to Oxx. Two thirds of students on the university foundation course were offered third-level places - "an extremely satisfactory success rate", she says.

The two-year Leaving Cert course offers students the opportunity to take science at third-level - Leaving Cert biology and chemistry are both on offer at Pearse College. The university foundation course, on the other hand, is geared to towards the arts and social sciences.

Pearse College offers a good range of Leaving Cert subjects: English, Irish, French, maths, history, geography, business organisation, art, home economics (social and scientific), biology and chemistry.