OUR ELDEST IS finishing Transition Year this week and the end cannot come quickly enough. As we close it out, I am thinking of this time last year, when she was up to her eyeballs sitting the Junior Cert.
She was studying for hours every day, and we had to prise her away from the books. I couldn’t wait for her to start Transition Year, to have a break from the serious exam worry and take her foot off the pedal for a year.
Well, do I have an exciting update for that version of myself! Not only did her foot come off the pedal, but the car is also actually in reverse at this stage. Or free-falling. The car fell off a cliff and is now a fiery ball of… you get the idea.
I didn’t do Transition Year. It wasn’t an option in my school; you just jumped from 3rd to 5th. I was 17 sitting the Leaving Cert and while I didn’t really think anything of it at the time I have only ever heard great things about TY, and how the extra year of development really helps when it comes to the Leaving Cert exams. So for us, it was definitely a no-brainer, she was doing TY.
A year to kick back
She had studied consistently throughout third year and was more than a little burnt out by the end of the exams. And it was great in that sense to look forward to a year that wasn’t going to be as academically rigid.
In hindsight, the 10 weeks of summer holidays was probably enough to fix this. I don’t think I’ve ever had a problem that couldn’t be solved with 10 weeks off.
From very early on in the school term, she was complaining that she was bored, and I, in what can only be described as catastrophic optimism, told her that boredom was good. Boredom allowed her brain space to grow! As a former teenager myself, I should have known that a bored 16-year-old is actually the stuff of nightmares because they are now a trouble-seeking missile.
It also led to a complete drop in motivation for her across almost all areas of her life. She went from balancing the gym around her study schedule, in a highly organised bedroom, to no longer doing any of those things. She also got in a lot of trouble in school, and definitely drove her teachers insane, which really wasn’t something she had done before.
At least not intentionally.
But in TY, it was definitely intentional. Her goals for the year seemed to revolve around breaking any rule she could find and also challenging every authority figure. It was around this time that the school thought it was a good idea to stick a debate class in her weekly schedule and give her the tools to back up her horrific attitude.
The TY programme itself was relatively good. There were opportunities to partake in things like Sports or Gaisce, but they weren’t of any interest to her. And there’s very little encouraging you can do when they are 16. She did take on a politics class, which she really enjoyed, and she did a little bit of Home Ec and Art.
It seemed like there was a ‘drumming workshop’ every other week. She enjoyed those, which was great, but it also felt like a really intense amount of drumming. She did some good courses like First Aid and Barista training, but there were also a lot of filler classes, and there was minimal meaningful learning.
Is TY a waste?
On her first day of TY, she was given a packet of colouring pencils in place of any textbooks for the year, and this really should have been our first red flag.
She was a highly focused and academically driven student in third year. She is competitive and doesn’t like unstructured learning. Or unstructured anything.
Transition Year was very loosely structured. She had a timetable for the week, but no one seemed to care if she wasn’t in. In May, I realised I could check through the individual days on the school app and saw that she was going to tutor class, and then very little else for the rest of the day.
And what did she do with her days? Oh, literally anything that she shouldn’t.
There was no academic challenge, which is also one of the major selling points of the year. How could I have known that this would lead to an existential crisis? It just got harder and harder to motivate her to go to school, which was an issue we had never had before.
She began the year as a confident, organised, independent and socially comfortable person and seemed to do a full turnaround in the year. Disorganisation spread into every aspect of her life. There were class tests that she wasn’t prepared for, didn’t take seriously, and didn’t do well in. Despite her casual approach to this, it has still knocked her confidence.
The work experience challenge
Another major part of the year is the weeks when the students do work experience. The enthusiasm for this quickly evaporated when we realised a lot of the preparation is outsourced to the parents. I thought the school would be more involved in helping them find placements, but they don’t take part in this.
Which, fine, I get it, she has given you an awful attitude all year (not pointing any fingers, but you did teach her debate), but it did leave her at a disadvantage. I am a very ‘hands off’ and ‘they’ll figure it out themselves’ kind of parent, and needless to say, she didn’t get anything sorted in time for the first placement.
We only realised the night before when I asked her what time she was due to start the following morning. She shrugged and said she thought she would ‘go in for around 11 am’.
I paused because nobody benefits from my initial reaction, and tried to ask more direct questions to get the information I needed. It turned out that aside from a quick initial email inquiring about placement (sent four days before the expected start date), she hadn’t actually had any other contact with that company whatsoever.
This resulted in me simultaneously saving the day by bringing her to work with me and also ruining her life by bringing her to work with me. Needless to say, she moved a bit quicker on her second placement.
This one was in a primary school, which she adored. And the third one was in a local solicitors’ office. She secured both of those herself by approaching the places directly too.
Then she went to TikTok to search up ‘office outfits’ and found a whole pile of incredibly inappropriate options that we then had to talk her out of; ‘No, love, ‘office siren’ isn’t a thing’.
She came home from the first day in the office, saying she was exhausted. She looked up at me from where she was sprawled on the couch and said ‘I don’t know how you do this every day and then come home to make dinner’ and, not to be dramatic, but it really healed something in me.
Would you do TY?
So, it begs the question, if we could go back in time, would we choose the same path again?
Apparently so, because my second daughter is enrolled to begin TY in September. What can I say? I refuse to learn from my mistakes.
In all honesty, though, I do think some students benefit hugely from TY. And for sure, the resourcing of schools is a factor, too.
I just no longer believe TY is essential for everyone.
I do think my younger one will get much more out of it. She will likely benefit hugely from a break from the academic pressure and a focus on confidence building. But if she didn’t want to, I would not insist. And if she hadn’t secured a place, I would not be at all concerned.
If the student uses Transition Year well, it can be a fantastic benefit. But there’s also every chance you’ll watch your previously well-adjusted child unravel fully while you re-mortgage the house to pay for the fees, the drumming workshops and whatever it is she has been doing during those school hours because it certainly wasn’t going to class.
Margaret Lynch is a mother of two and a parenting columnist with The Journal.