Schools all over Ireland are reopening this week.  It’s a really anxious time for parents and children as there has been a lot of uncertainty about when and how schools will cope with the new academic year.   The 2020-21 school environment will be very different from what it looked like before the lockdown.  School schedules,…

Monday brought with it the end to one of the most pressing and agonizing questions that students from all over Ireland have been grappling with since the leaving cert results arrived; have I received enough points to secure a place in University? For many students last week was excruciatingly long and unfortunately ultimately punctuated with bitter…

Now that the Leaving Certificate has ended and all that exam stress has dissipated and the house has returned to some semblance of normality, parents can finally start to enjoy the summer. And yet for many parents, a new kind of stressor is visiting them as they decide whether or not to let their teenage son…

For many parents of teenagers, this time of year can be quite stressful. There are only 12 weeks to the Leaving and Junior Cert examinations. Many of the conversations I have with parents, as we move towards the summer months, are around how to motivate their son/daughter to study for the upcoming exams. Parents can feel incredibly…

Thomas Kinsella has a wonderful poem called, ‘Model School Inchicore.’ In the poem Kinsella explores the notion that the old traditional educational system of Ireland shrank creativity rather than promoted it, writes Richard Hogan. The opening line is the longest in the poem and the final line is the shortest, representing the reductionist impact our…