Meet the Class of 2022: ‘It’s brutal - it all comes down to one exam’

After a bumpy few years of school closures, online schooling and predicted grades, it’s back to normality – of sorts – for the class of 2022.

It is the first full set of State exams in three years. To make up for disruption they have experienced, there are adjustments to this year’s papers such as more choice and fewer questions. The Minister for Education has also pledged that results this year, on aggregate, will be no lower than last year.

Nonetheless, it promises to be a nerve-jangling experience.

Over the coming weeks, The Irish Times will be charting the progress of students at Creagh College, Gorey, Co Wexford, one of the largest schools in Ireland, with more than 1,000 pupils and 80 staff.

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Six students – Santhwana Saju, Leah Quigg, Michael Murphy, Ellen McCabe, Jakub Golinski and Katie Cullen – will be sharing their exam highs and lows, as well as their hopes for the future.

School principal Paul Glynn, who has led the school since 2011, says the north Wexford commuter town is a community in flux which reflects how the world is changing.

“It’s a growing commuter town and there have always been people coming and going,” Glynn says. “We’ve had some students from Ukraine and we are a school of sanctuary, providing support to children who are refugees and asylum seekers. This came about when an ‘emergency provision’ [centre] opened in Courtown and we enrolled some of the young people living there. Inclusion and the celebration of diversity are central to what we do; diversity is not a challenge, but an opportunity.”

The school itself, like many built around the same time, followed best practices for educational design: open common spaces, lots of windows and lighting, and large central meeting spaces with high ceilings. And because this kind of design allows for lots of ventilation, it was the perfect building for dealing with the challenges of an airborne pandemic.

One of the biggest challenges and frustrations for the school, Glynn explains, has been to open up all the special needs classrooms: the building is there, but getting official sanction from the Department of Education to open them all up has been a challenge and so some of the rooms sit empty while parents of autistic and other neurodiverse children apply to other schools.

The school has strengths in GAA, basketball and cycling, while outside sports, music and Junk Kouture – a fashion design competition – are also popular with students.

There is so much unpredicability’

—  Santhwana Saju (19)

“Being 19 and doing the Leaving Cert is not unusual, but it does mean that I’ll be 23 or 24 before I’m out of college. So much of my life has been taken by school.

“I’m hoping to move to Dublin to study global business in Trinity but, like a lot of us, I worry about the cost of living. I’ve also been getting more stressed as the Leaving Cert gets closer. What if I open the paper and don’t know the answers or don’t remember it exactly? There is so much unpredictability. The Leaving Cert is brutal, and it all comes down to that one exam.

“When it’s over, I’m going to visit India, as I haven’t been there in over three years. I’m looking forward to just destressing and not having to timetable my whole life.”

We missed so much because of Covid

—  Leah Quigg (18)

“Because Gorey is some distance from any nearby third-level, commuting to and from college would be really tough. So, like a lot of us, my biggest worry – beyond the Leaving Cert, of course – is the cost of living and the difficulty of finding accommodation.

“Irish is my favourite subject, and I’m hoping to get enough points to study Irish and English at Maynooth University, and become a teacher. But it’s also a worry that, with fewer questions to answer on the paper, the standard might be higher.

“I’m head prefect here, and one of our roles has been to welcome the new Ukrainian students to school. As students, we missed so much because of Covid, but it must be so much harder to be coming from a different country because of a war. What many of them wanted to know was simply which teachers were nice.”

Getting enough CAO points is always a worry

—  Michael Murphy (18)

“I’m hoping to study computer science at Maynooth University, and to live on campus. Of course, there’s a worry about accommodation, but I have relatives in Kildare so that could be an option.

“The aim is to work in software development, perhaps for a big tech firm, but of course getting enough CAO points is always a worry. Computer science is my favourite subject, and accounting – which was not my first choice but I had to do for timetabling reasons – is my least.

“We feel that we weren’t really listened to by Minister for Education Norma Foley, and when we tried to email her our concerns, the email didn’t go through.

“It’s important to find time to relax during this stressathon, and I like to play computer games or simply just go out for a walk. That’s what I did during the pandemic, because I was over an hour’s walk from the school which meant it wasn’t always easy to meet up with people.”

This will be my first State exam

—  Ellen McCabe, 17

“I’m the youngest in this group because I skipped transition year. And I didn’t have a Junior Cert either, because the exams were cancelled in 2020 due to Covid. So this will be my first State exam, and I feel it does put me at something of a disadvantage. But I’m not alone: there are a few of us in this boat.

“I’m hoping to study nursing at DCU, but have also been provisionally accepted into a pre-nursing PLC course as a backup, pending results.

“I feel that Minister for Education Norma Foley did not give us enough clarity until the week before the mocks and we still don’t know when the results will be in.”

We’re competing with the predicted grades of last year’s class

—  Jakub Golinski, 18

“I’m hoping to study computer science at Maynooth, with UCD and DCU as my backup options.

“I love computers. To de-stress during all of this, I listen to music and do some computer programming. Indeed, I’m already being paid to do it; it’s my part-time job.

“My favourite subject is physics, and my least favourite are Irish and English.

“My family came here from Poland when I was about three or four years old. The stress of high expectations can be hard, particularly when we have so much uncertainty about CAO points. We’re competing with the predicted grades of last year’s class, so we’re really up against it.”

Everything is going up. Accommodation... food... points

—  Katie Cullen, 18

“I’m studying English, Irish, maths, accounting, Spanish, biology and chemistry. Of these, my accounting teacher is my favourite, although I can’t say it is my favourite subject; that would be maths.

“I am hoping to get into medicine, but not sure if I will get the points needed, so I’m now looking at doing graduate entry medicine after a different degree. Going abroad is an option, but I don’t really want to go to a different country.

“Everything is going up. Points went up last year and we feel we haven’t gotten much clarity on where this is all going. Take just one course: computer science, which has risen from 480.

“The rising cost of everything is a worry: you could be paying €250 per week for accommodation and that’s before you even factor in the cost of food, which is rising too.

“On top of all of this, the clarity from the Department of Education – and the Minister – came so late that our teachers had to spend time preparing for questions that it now turns out we didn’t need to do.

“To relax in the middle of all of this, it’s tea, biscuits and some Netflix, and maybe a bit of PlayStation.”