About this time every year, a portion of Leaving Cert students are left feeling disappointed and emotionally drained.
You didn’t get the results you had hoped for, and as a result, you haven’t been offered your preferred course at third level. This is difficult to come to terms with and it is important to take some time to process your situation.
Fortunately, though you are feeling disheartened, there are many options available to secondary school graduates in Ireland today. These are not fallbacks, and the different pathways mentioned in this piece are very viable first choices. Still, if you had your mind set on one route, you might be uninformed about the list of alternatives.
Take time to process
Joanne Logan, a guidance counsellor at Confey College in Kildare, deals with disappointed students every year. “The first thing I would say to them is to acknowledge how they’re feeling,” she says. “It’s okay to feel upset and disappointed because every Leaving Cert student has worked hard.
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“I think particularly if they don’t get their first choice, it can be a really uncertain time. I would always try to reassure them that some of the most successful people didn’t get their start in the exact path that they imagined. What really stands to people now is there are so many different options available in Ireland.”
You may be dead set on studying your first choice, and if that is the case, you have choices. It could be that your dream university is now out of reach, but the course is available elsewhere with a lower points requirement. You might be tempted to repeat sixth year, but there is no guarantee that will put you in a better stead. If you have fallen narrowly short of the required points, your first option is to appeal.
Appeal your results
There is a short window in which you can view your Leaving Cert exam scripts towards the end of August, before deciding whether to appeal any of your results. It is important to keep an eye on the CAO timetable of events so that you don’t miss these deadlines. If you are viewing any scripts, it can help to have a teacher alongside you.
“The script-viewing happens on a Saturday or Sunday, so students need to contact their teacher to ask them if they would like them to be there,” Logan says. “We say to students to bring a mobile phone in with them to take a copy of the script and to have a calculator on the phone as well. Often the marking scheme will be provided by the review centre, but it’s sometimes helpful to bring the exam paper in with you as well to remember the question.”
In terms of analysing the paper, the first thing to do is check that the marks are added up correctly. Students are not allowed to write on the exam script, so Logan advises you to leave a pen and paper outside of the viewing centre and pop out momentarily to jot down an error if you find one. If you do want to appeal your results, you can do so on examinations.ie.
CAO offers in later rounds
There are at least two more CAO offers to come, meaning you may yet get an offer for your preferred course. That shouldn’t deter you from accepting something further down your list. You can only accept one initial offer, but you are not prevented from accepting another offer in a later round.
If a place on a course with higher requirements becomes available in a later round, you will receive a new offer, and you can choose to accept or ignore it. It is not uncommon for a student to begin one course in September, before moving to another university in October or November when they get a different offer.
Study abroad
Plenty of Irish students choose to head overseas, where points requirements may be lower for a course they really want. If you want to study in the United Kingdom, you can apply for courses through the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service (Ucas), which is their version of the Central Applications Office (CAO). At this stage, you will generally be looking at clearing courses, which are the equivalent of the CAO’s available places facility.
“There are over a thousand programmes in Europe that are being taught through English in loads of the European colleges. These really are excellent options, particularly for specific areas like medicine, veterinary medicine, dentistry, physio and nursing, because they’re all linked to and recognised by Irish professional bodies.
“If they’re going to Europe, entry requirements are much lower, and the cost of living can be much lower. It can be a great incentive for students if they miss out on the points here to look at Europe. The only note of caution I would give is that Irish students are reporting that although the programmes are easier to get into in Europe, students have to study really hard when they get over there. You really have to prove yourself when you get into these courses.”
Level six and seven courses
Another option is to go down the route of a level six or seven course. In Ireland’s National Framework of Qualifications (NFQ), these courses are one or two steps below a level eight honours bachelor degree. They tend to require lower points and are shorter in length. Typically, a level six course is two years, and a level seven is three.
Resulting qualifications are valuable on their own, but thanks to the ladder approach, many level six and seven courses offer “add-on” years to graduates. This means you can do an extra year to move from level six to seven, and another year to move from seven to eight. For some students, this flexibility is preferable to committing to a four-year course from the get-go.
“A lot of the time, they’re quite practical and career-focused, and they have a strong emphasis on skill development, sometimes more so than level eight courses,” Logan says. “They also have a built-in work experience component, which can really enhance a student’s employability for the future.
“Sometimes you get students who say, ‘I didn’t get that course, so I’m just not going to go to college’. It might knock their confidence, so a level six or seven can be [perfect]. Sometimes the class sizes are smaller, so it can offer a real supportive transition from secondary school into college. It can help students rebuild their confidence.”
Post Leaving Cert (PLC) courses
Similarly, PLC courses offer strong qualifications in their own right and a route to many third-level courses around Ireland. Generally, a PLC is one year for a level five qualification and two years for a level six. About 200 institutions offer PLC courses in the State, meaning they are available countrywide.
“It removes the pressure of having to relocate, which sometimes students can really be worried about, because it’s already in the community,” Logan says. “What an awful lot of people don’t understand as well, is that often 10 per cent of places on all of the college courses are kept for PLC applicants.
“We hear year in and year out from college courses that these places are sometimes not filled because PLC applicants aren’t actually applying for them. They cannot be used for students coming from secondary school through the Leaving Cert; they’re just kept for PLCs.”
Some of the courses Logan lists as examples in this regard are nursing in DCU, law and business in University of Galway, optometry in TU Dublin and arts in Maynooth. PLC course graduates are ready to enter employment, but there is ample opportunity to progress to another stage of education if that’s your preference.
Apprenticeships and traineeships
Both huge areas of growth in recent years, apprentices and trainees are highly sought in Ireland. These options fall under Further Education and Training, and the main difference between the two is time. Apprenticeships tend to be two to four years long, while traineeships are six to 20 months. Both offer on-the-job learning and focus on preparing students for employment.
Apprenticeships facilitate a qualification on the NFQ anywhere between levels five and nine. Crucially, as well as getting valuable learning opportunities, apprentices can earn a wage while they study. There are craft apprenticeships that fall into traditional, established fields like carpentry, plumbing, engineering and mechanics.
“Then there’s the new apprenticeship which was developed in 2016,” Logan says. “Those are areas that [the Government] saw that there was a need for, like accounting, chefs, logistics, insurance, auctioneering, cybersecurity, butchers, hairdressing. There’s an amazing opportunity for students to go into that area of growth.”
National Tertiary Office (NTO) Courses
Since 2023, NTO courses have been bypassing the CAO points system. The idea is a seamless transition from Further Education and Training to higher education. The National Tertiary Office option is another area of growth and courses are available for the likes of nursing, science, business, social work and occupational therapy.
“Unlike PLCs, NTOs have guaranteed progression routes into a third-level degree,” Logan says. “This means that as long as a learner reaches the required academic standard, they are guaranteed to progress on from the further education course, generally run by ETBs, to the higher education course and then they can complete their degree.”
Available places
After CAO offers have been made, there are some courses that end up not being filled. It is a case of supply and demand, with some candidates declining their offers for certain courses. Some courses may just not have enough eligible applicants.
You still need to meet minimum entry requirements for places, but you can ignore the previously published points from earlier CAO rounds. The available places facility opens on the CAO website on Thursday, August 28th, at noon.
