Over the last couple of weeks we’ve had a look at alternatives to taking A Levels. We’ve seen how the International Baccalaureate offers people the chance to combine rigorous academic study with taking six subjects at once, providing there’s an IB centre near you; and we’ve discussed that attractiveness of BTEC courses for people who want their learning to be more practically focused and more explicitly related to the careers that are based around the subjects they want to study.

In discussing these A Level alternatives, we’ve seen that both are accepted by universities when it comes to them weighing up course applicants and making offers. So for people who are making the transition from secondary school to college, with their subsequent intended destination being higher education, the IB and the BTEC are both attractive options.

What do you do, however, if you’ve been off the education treadmill for a while? Although A Levels, the IB and BTECs are open to people of all ages and circumstances, in practice people who have been away from education for a few years or more can sometimes find it difficult to adapt to studying courses that were designed with young people in particular in mind.

This is partly a question of availability, with many colleges only offering these qualifications on a full-time basis. But it can also be a matter of being acclimatised for a return to study. The longer people have been outside of education, the more likely that it is that they’ll have started to lose effective study habits. And in some cases they may have never had a chance to develop them at all, depending on their own particular school-days experiences.

There used to be a time when people who wanted to go to university but hadn’t had a decent run of things the first time they went to school found it very difficult to have another go at getting the qualifications they needed to do so as a result of the inflexibility of the qualifications system. Now, however, through the Access course system, those people are in a much better position to restart their education.

Offered by further-education institutions across the country, Access courses are a great first step on the road to university if you either didn’t come away from school with many qualifications or it’s been quite a while since you last set foot in a classroom.

Unlike BTECs, A Levels or the IB, Access courses are designed specifically to prepare you for the demands of higher education in your chosen subject. This means they place a decent level of emphasis on academic skills in addition to teaching the subject knowledge that you’ll need before you start at uni.

And unlike A Levels or the IB, Access courses specialise in one area only, being offered under labels such as Access to Business or Access to Law. The upside of this is of course that you’re already specialising in what you presumably want to study at university; the other side of this particular coin is of course that if you’re not sure what you want to study at university Access courses can sometimes be a bit restrictive.

That said, it tends to be the case that when people do return to education with the goal of getting into uni, it’s because they have a clear vision of what they want to study and how it will help them with their career. If you find yourself in this boat, an Access course could be your best bet for turning that vision into a reality.