Ballyfermot College of Further Education celebrates College Awareness Week 2018!

Ballyfermot College of Further Education organises inter-institutional community mentoring visit to mark College Awareness Week.

Ballyfermot College of Further Education (BCFE) will celebrate College Awareness Week by holding one of the young programme’s first ever community mentoring visits. Community Mentors setting out to BCFE are three mature undergraduate students from the National College of Art and Design (NCAD) and Trinity College (TCD) whose goal is to reach out to mature students with a disability, students from the Irish travelling community, lone parents and socio-economically under-represented students in Further Education in Dublin city to encourage and motivate them to consider higher education as an option.

Deputy Principal of BCFE Jacqueline Maloney said, “We are delighted to be part of a nationwide campaign to promote the importance of post-secondary education. There are lots of options out there and College Awareness Week encourages people of all ages to consider further education as part of their future.”

CAW and Community Mentoring aims to inspire and inform all students about the importance of having a post-secondary education plan. It advocates for students to have the choice to pursue the course best suited to their interests, abilities and dreams, whether that is a PLC qualification, an apprenticeship or a university degree.

CAW and Community Mentoring is supported by the National Association of Principals and Deputy Principals and the Institute of Guidance Counsellors. Many other organisations such as The National Parents Council Post-Primary, the Irish Union of Second Level Students and Irish Business Employers Confederation have backed the campaign.

The inaugural Community Mentoring visits highlighted how there is no direct path to but a variation of routes of post-primary plans. Mentoring students spent the entire morning to afternoon speaking of college-life, braining storming about what careers an education brings and the personal-growth that education encourages. It might be early days for community mentoring but from the demand we’re already seeing, it’s a wondering string added to our bow!