Adult Education Courses in Languages

Practically all our language courses at Cactus are designed for adult education. Courses run in the evenings, generally from 6:30 - 8:30pm, or 7pm to 9pm, allowing you enough time to get to one of our centres, from wherever it is you work. At the time of writing we have 21 locations around London, making it easier than ever to find a location near you.

Click here for details of all our adult education courses or use the search box on the top left corner to search for a course in your city.

The range of languages on offer has increased substantially over the last 3 years, and now includes Arabic, Czech, Chinese (Mandarin and Cantonese), Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese (Brazilian and European), Russian, Swedish, Spanish, Thai and Turkish, and all our trainers are experienced and qualified, and most importantly, native speakers of the language they teach.

The term ‘adult education’ is usually applied to higher education colleges or universities, and it’s true that these institutions do run many evening language courses - not only in London, but around the UK.

How are Cactus courses different from typical adult education courses?

Cactus adult education courses are shorter, typically 10 weeks in duration, as opposed to many university or FE programmes which run for a whole academic year. It is possible of course at Cactus to book 3 or 4 of our language courses in succession, but we feel it’s better to break things up into manageable chunks.

Speaking to some of the 12000 people who book an adult education language course with Cactus every year, one of the biggest problems with signing up to a year’s course, is that you can’t always plan your free time that far ahead. Other priorities come up, over the year, and if you’re not careful, your language course can easily become a nagging, guilt-inducing item on your “to do” list, rather than something to really look forward to. And no learning experience should ever be based on guilt.

At Cactus we turn it into a positive experience, and this can be measured by the fact that more people book with Cactus as ‘past students’ and via word of mouth, than they do having found us on Google - and we do seem to appear quite prominently on Google.

Numbers of people in class

What we’re told ends up happening in FE courses is that the language course starts with 20-30 students in class at the beginning of the academic year. Some drop out because of the excessive numbers, and gradually this gets to about 15 by Christmas. Some come back after New Year, but then realise they’ve missed too much to know what is going on, and by Easter break, it might be a group of 8. By the end of the summer term, the 3 or 4 people remaining know they’re onto a good thing. They’re getting almost individual attention from their teacher, and they’ve had extremely good value for money. Of more concern are those who have stopped learning who still have the same genuine reasons to learn a language, and yet, through various factors, have been unable to attend.

At Cactus, we have maximum class sizes of 12 for most locations, rising to an occasional 15 in some bigger venues. Attendance remains high over the 10-week period, and our students often meet socially after class.

If, after the first 10-week block, you have other engagements, you can find the right level of class in the language you’re studying, on a different day of the week.