‘If you know your Flann O’Brien, you’ll know that bike maintenance and philosophy go arse-on-saddle in this country,” Niall Hare, the 63-year-old headteacher at Kishoge community college in Dublin, told me. He was running through what his students do on their “transition year”, which is the missing fourth year (a year 11 in England, Wales, year 12 in Northern Ireland or S4 in Scotland) of the Irish education system. Even the way it’s named has a magical, secret-compartment quality, like Platform 9 3/4 in Harry Potter, or the 7 1/2th floor in Being John Malkovich.
In Ireland, secondary school starts with the three-year junior cycle, beginning at age 12 or 13, and concluding with a Junior Certificate (roughly equivalent to a GCSE in England, Wales and Northern Ireland or Nationals in Scotland). Then you can either go straight into the two-year senior cycle to start preparing for the Leaving Certificate (roughly equivalent to A-levels or the International Baccalaureate), or you can have a transition year (TY) first – so you could think of it as a kind of gap year, halfway through secondary school.
There’s no curriculum for any part of TY, but core subjects – Irish, English, maths, PE – have to be covered in some form, for two hours a week. Work experience is recommended at two to four weeks a year; career guidance and social, personal and health education (SPHE) for an hour a week. Otherwise, schools decide for themselves what to do.
Hare canters through what’s going on in his TY for 2024-25: nine weeks each of Chinese, folklore and law; nine weeks of BodyRight, a consent, relationships and friendship workshop devised by Dublin Rape Crisis Centre. Then there’s everything from aviation to arts, coding to car maintenance, political engagement to boxing. There’s a young scientist programme, with two separate blocks of work experience. As part of a Stem module, two former police officers set up a crime scene and show kids how to run an investigation.
Even though you’re not graded, you do have to participate: Paul Mescal recalled being dragged into musicals on his TY at his Maynooth post-primary. He ended up being cast as the lead in their production of Phantom of the Opera. “I know for a fact I probably wouldn’t have auditioned because of the masculinity that I’d been prescribed by being on a sports team,” he later said. “But since we all had to audition, I was, like, ‘Well, I may as well put my best foot forward.’”
Cillian Murphy also became an actor during his TY, via a theatre workshop that not only fostered a passion for the stage but introduced him to the artistic director Pat Kiernan, who later cast him in his breakthrough production, Disco Pigs. “I remember loving it,” Murphy later said. “It felt like a real oasis between the junior cycle and the senior cycle.”
It’s not always the razzle-dazzle stuff that students talk about. Kacey, who is 17 and in her final senior year at Kishoge, is studying for her driving theory test. “I’m terrified of the road,” she says. “If I hop in a car, I’m crashing into a wall. But in the modules, seeing that it’s not so easy for everyone else – it’s a slow work-up, knowing how stuff works.” Stuff like: what do you put on a CV? How do you acclimatise your parents to the new reality that you’re a young adult? How do you use a bus timetable? How do you address a citizens’ assembly on the subject of drug abuse? How do you make a burrito? “TY says, ‘OK, you need to know this soon. Sit down, we’re going to teach it to you, we’re not just going to expect you to guess.’”
Transition year is either 50 years old this year, or 30, depending on whether you date it from the first pilot schools in 1974, or the national rollout in 1994. Now, 99% of schools offer TY programmes, and almost 80% of students choose it.
It was the brainchild of Richard Burke, a passionate internationalist who joined the Fine Gael party to deepen Ireland’s relationship with Europe, but arguably made his greatest impact with his maverick views on education and child development. “The original idea was to create a space for kids where they could take a year out, and appreciate some of the finer arts – classical music, great literature, that sort of thing,” says Burke’s son David, a barrister. Burke, who died in 2016, had grown up in rural Tipperary in a large, extremely poor family, fatherless as a result of the second world war. What he really wanted to close was the cultural gap between rich and poor – the fact that, as seriously as education has always been taken in Ireland, it had a grindstone quality, every moment maximised for some measurable self-improvement. Gerry Jeffers, a semi-retired researcher and lecturer who was a driving force in rolling out TY in the 90s, said the idea was to “take a break from the treadmill. A bit of the spirit of that lovely poem: ‘What is this life if, full of care, we have no time to stand and stare?’”
It started in three schools, in Dublin, Limerick and County Galway, and it was a little wild, to be honest. Sheelagh Hare, Niall’s sister who now lives in Australia, did her school’s pilot TY in 1978 and, she says, “We didn’t do anything like they do now. There was none of that zip-lining.” Instead, they did six UK O-levels, when they’d just come out of Junior Certification, so ended up with a bunch of random sort-of duplicated qualifications. “The teachers didn’t really know what to do with us. But I was quite young in my mindset, so I got a lot out of just having an extra year.”
That, emphatically, would not have been what Burke had in mind. And there would be elements of even the best of a modern transition year which he wouldn’t be thrilled about either, David says: “I think he’d be a little bit disappointed, although not terribly, by the fact that kids are using part of the year for work experience.” If the TY was initially conceived as a pause in the commodification of the human experience, the way it has evolved reveals a lot about our changing expectations of the market, what we’ve surrendered to it and what we still hope to preserve.
The pilot scheme was enough of a success that the government put some money behind it in the 1990s – approximately £50 a student, Jeffers remembers – and it was expanded to almost every school, to considerable resistance from educators, who thought parents wouldn’t have it, which initially they didn’t. “Regularly on radio phone-ins in the 90s, people would say, ‘It’s a waste of time,’” says Jeffers. “My attitude was: let people have their say. If this thing is working, parents are soon going to phone in with the other side of the story. When they experienced it, they saw it as fantastic – they could see their youngsters growing and developing and maturing and gaining confidence.”
What comes up now on those phone-ins is still that it’s a “doss year”, plus objections to the fact that kids can be 19 before they finish school, so – in the memorable image of one radio DJ – “you see fellas with full beards now in sixth year”. “Every transition year is different,” Niall tells me, walking through the high-ceilinged corridors of his school, which opened in 2014. It’s anti-racism week, and downstairs, mid-morning, people are fixing up a pot luck lunch. Students have brought in the cuisine of their forebears. The place smells delicious. Hare says “it’s a myth that it’s a doss year”, in his experience, and “the second myth is that the kids lose the habit of study”.
After TY comes two years of the senior cycle culminating in the Leaving Cert, scored out of a maximum of 625 and highly deterministic of what university and course you can apply for (another way to string out your school career until you have a full beard is to retake that for a higher score). An ESRI study, albeit 20 years old, found that students who did a transition year got an average of 40 more points that those who went straight into the senior cycle, while repeating students only got an average of five more points.
The data is complicated by the fact that TY is meant to be an escape from “all the pressure on points, points, points”, Jeffers says, exasperated. “Transfer rates to tertiary institutions. What’s a good school? Is it how many of those people went off to Trinity, or did the students discover something about themselves?” (If we want to get “points, points, points” about it, though, Ireland performs far above the OECD average in maths and science, and in literacy, it is second only to Singapore.)
Those discoveries students make about themselves are completely idiosyncratic. Scott, 17, went in to TY thinking he wanted to be a coder and came out wanting to study psychology. Jess, 17, says “before TY I was really nose-in-books, always English/theoretical based. I did the coding module, and as a result of that, I’ve ended up doing computer science.” Niamh, 18, discovered hiking is not as bad as it looks. Sive, 18, did a module on drug abuse and has since addressed a citizens’ assembly, and has spoken to the Irish finance minister “to increase the drug prevention budget and try to increase the personal budget”. Oh, also, “I’m changing a tyre, I’m cooking. There was one teacher, I didn’t peep a word in his class. After TY, now I’m in fifth year, I’ll sit in his room and eat my lunch.”
That is echoed in the teachers’ experience: they say TY deepens their relationships with students, and, freed from a curriculum, they can explore their own passions. Dale McCarthy, 37, says he emigrated to Ireland from England, having taught in Manchester and two large London comprehensives. “When I was in the UK, the class’s grades were mine. Now, they don’t feel like my results. They belong to an individual. I was blown away by that: ‘Oh right, the students are in charge of their own learning.’ As teachers, we’re trusted. The levels of bureaucracy are much lower. No one’s checking to see if I taught my lessons. If I was in the room, I taught it.” In London, he was burnt out and doubted he’d be teaching till he was 50; now, he says, he’s probably a lifer. Teaching has a much higher status in Ireland, and transition year both recognises and contributes to that.
Against all that positivity, though, transition year doesn’t happen in a bell jar. Kishoge is one of 118 “Educate Together” schools in Ireland – part of a drive to break the stranglehold the Catholic church has had over education. Its founding values are that it’s democratically run, equality-based, learner-centred and co-educational, and it has special educational needs provision where kids with disabilities can dip in and out of mainstream education, including TY. “It’s not that complicated, to go between sensory needs support and horticulture,” Eve Brennan, the SEN coordinator, says.
Kishoge isn’t, in other words, necessarily representative of the wider social experience. A report this year by Ireland’s ombudsman for children registered “complaints about equitable access” and “inconsistencies in admission” to TY in schools around the country. Kids could be excluded for behavioural incidents that they had no idea would have major repercussions, for example (in one memorable case study, a boy was refused a place because he’d been bullied in third year).
Then there is the financial aspect of TY: some parents just can’t afford it. Although the government covers the baseline costs of the teachers, plus offering extra funding per student and grants that are means-tested, the cost to parents can be prohibitive, at anywhere between €100 and €900. The ombudsman has castigated this, saying all children have a right to participate, and calling for “a specific child’s rights framework with guiding principles on how schools should administer admission to this highly desirable and beneficial year in school”.
Mid-afternoon outside Kishoge, Michael Manners is showing the transition year class how to mend a bike puncture and cycle a roundabout. Their skills vary wildly, and make me think back to the first time I cycled a roundabout, which was a total guess. (I didn’t even know you gave way to the right; I thought the rule was “whoever’s the bravest”.) As much as the principle that all kids have a right to participate might shine an unflattering light on contextual inequalities, the scheme is still a good one. It’s great to find your calling during Phantom of the Opera. It’s also great if you know how to cycle a roundabout.