Non-curricular EU languages witness surge

THE numbers due to sit Leaving Certificate exams in non-curricular EU languages is up by more than a quarter this year to 1,323.

Almost half of them are preparing for next Monday afternoon, when 582 students are entered to take Polish papers, up from 451 who took the subject last year.

The next most common EU languages which are not taught as part of the mainstream curriculum are Lithuanian (257 students, 50 more than last year) and Latvian (121 candidates compared with 96 in 2010). The numbers taking Slovakian exams has risen from less than 10 a year ago to 38 sitting the papers on Friday, June 24.

Students have to meet certain conditions to be eligible to take these exams, including a requirement that they are from an EU member state, they speak the language they choose to be examined in as a mother tongue and they must also be taking Leaving Certificate English.

Students whose first language is not English or Irish are allowed to use dictionaries for translation in certain Junior and Leaving Certificate exams, an allowance availed of by more than 3,500 candidates last year.

Meanwhile, there are 3,245 students entered to sit the Leaving Certificate Applied (LCA), 5% fewer than were due to take the exams this time last year.

The numbers have fluctuated slightly upward or downward in each of the last few years but this year’s entry level for LCA is down from a high of 3,620 in 2004.

As part of education cuts which took effect in September 2009, the year this year’s school leavers started senior cycle, the Government withdrew additional funding to schools to run LCA programmes. However, it is unclear what number of schools, if any, actually dropped the choice of taking the alternative to the traditional Leaving Certificate.