`I'd rather have gone straight to the Leaving'

Anne McCarvill (16) from Monaghan loved Transition Year, though if it had not been compulsory in the town's St Louis Secondary School, she would have preferred to carry straight through to Leaving Certificate.

She packed a large amount into her year. She did work experience in a national newspaper and took part in a national public-speaking competition on the subject of mental health.

One of her most challenging experiences was doing a group project on careers in agriculture, which won her team a place in the finals of the national Agri-Aware competition to promote agriculture.

She also went on adventure sport outings, took part in a musical, coached younger girls in basketball and took modules in French, German, physics and chemistry. She is clearly a highly motivated student. However, she admits, if you are not highly motivated it can be a year of hanging around doing relatively little.

There are plenty of jobs for young people in Monaghan these days; roughly 80 per cent of the students in her Transition Year were working at the same time. That is fine, she says, unless you are working very long hours and come into school so tired you don't get anything out of the day's activities.

`It's going to be hard returning to full-time study'

Paul Byrne (16) from Rathfarnham, Dublin, is a student in St Mary's College, the famous rugby-playing boys' school in Rathmines in south Dublin. He and three friends put together a "mini-company" to produce a school tracksuit. They persuaded the principal and the PE teacher to back them, put the school crest on a computer disc and wrote away for quotes from Fruit of the Loom for jumpers and t-shirts and to O'Neills for tracksuit bottoms. They have so far sold about 170 tracksuits and made £230 in profit each.

At the other end of the spectrum, St Mary's boys are encouraged, in line with the school's Holy Ghost ethos, to work with the elderly. He worked stocking shelves in the Oxfam shop in Rathmines. Classmates went to deprived estates like Fatima Mansions and St Michael's House to talk to elderly residents. He was encouraged during a media-studies course, taught by an English teacher who is a former journalist, to think about doing journalism as a career.

One problem he sees about Transition Year is the absence of homework, which means that it is going to be hard getting back to full-time study next year. Just 15 minutes of maths homework every night was the limit this year; he admits his parents were "taken aback" at how little he was being given.

`The competitive students don't see the point'

Adela Meally (17), from Cullahill in County Laois and a student at St Fergal's College in Rathdowney, is a person with lively views and a willingness to express them.

She has enjoyed getting away from classroom subjects and into areas of what she calls "Newman's holistic education". She liked the emphasis on personal development, with weekly "roleplay" sessions to promote self-esteem.

However, she saw some contradiction between the free expression this encouraged and the "hierarchy of teachers" which is the norm in schools. She used her new self-confidence to write to complain that old-fashioned school uniforms were being brought into St Fergal's without proper consultation. What was the school's response to her pleas that education should not be about what you wear, and that girls should be allowed to wear trousers? "A big No". Two-thirds of her age group chose not to do Transition Year. They lost out, she says, "not seeing the point of it because they are so completely absorbed by the competitiveness of the Leaving Cert".

But what is the point of young people ending up as the "cream of the crop" academically, she says, when they are not able to explore important social issues like drugs, teenage pregnancies and young people's alienation?