Negotiating the Leaving Cert: Drama hardly helps students

The Leaving Cert has long been a rite of passage to be negotiated, one way or another, by young people coming to the end of their secondary education.

The 60,000 or so students who got their results yesterday may find it hard to believe but the great drama around the exam is a recent phenomenon. Their parents did not face anything like the same kind of pressure that now seems such an unavoidable feature of the process.