Growth of the ‘Transition Year’ programme nationally and in schools serving disadvantaged students, 1992–2011

Abstract

The Transition Year (TY) programme has seen large increases in the number of participating schools and students since the 1990s. However, existing documentation of this growth has been intermittent and sometimes inconsistent. This paper documents in detail the changes seen in school provision and student uptake for the 19 years from 1992/1993 to 2010/2011, drawing on data provided by the Department of Education and Skills. Issues considered include the mainstreaming of TY in 1994, cohort participation rates (proportions of junior cycle students progressing to TY), school type and student gender. Particular attention is given to provision and uptake of the programme with regard to students from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds. This is examined through the use of both school-level (school participation in schemes aimed at addressing socio-economic disadvantage) and student-level (possession of a medical card) information.

Keywords:

• Transition Year
• socio-economic disadvantage
• curricular innovation
• personal development
• secondary education

Acknowledgements

Thanks are extended to John Coyle, Susan Weir, Peter Archer and David Millar (Educational Research Centre) and to Mark Morgan and Michael O'Leary (St Patrick's College) for technical advice and comments during the preparation of this article. Thanks are also due to the Schools Division of the Department of Education and Skills for providing the data reported herein.

Notes

1. The scheme in question was the Disadvantaged Areas Scheme (DAS), under which schools were designated as ‘disadvantaged’ on the basis on a number of indicators relating to the student intake of the school. These indicators included medical card possession, residence in local authority housing or non-permanent accommodation, lone-parent family status, deprived rural backgrounds, parental unemployment and educational attainment and achievement (Weir and Archer 2005).

2. The difference in print reading scores among Fifth Year students was 50 points (Table 4.15, Perkins et al. 2010), on a scale set to an international mean of 500 with a standard deviation of 100.

3. The lack of up-to-date information can be seen in, for example, two relatively recent reports that put the proportion of students taking part in TY nationally at 25% (Engineers Ireland 2010) and 40% (Tormey and Gleeson 2012). In fact, as outlined in this paper, student uptake has been above 25% since the mid-1990s, greater than 40% since 2003/2004 and greater than 50% since 2008/2009.

4. These figures exclude two schools that report students (ranging from 52 to 126 students annually) in a ‘fourth’ year of the junior cycle between 1999 and 2009.

5. The JCSP is an alternative to the established Junior Certificate curriculum, and is aimed at making the junior cycle more engaging to students who are at risk of early school leaving. As of 2010/2011, more than 3000 students were enrolled in the JCSP.

6. As figures for the 1991/1992 Junior Certificate cohort are not available, these calculations begin with the 1992/1993 Junior Certificate and 1993/1994 TY students.

7. Information on schools’ designated status (participation in the DAS) was not available for the years 1992/1993–1998/1999 from the enrolment files provided by the Department of Education and Skills.

8. The medical card data were obtained by the Educational Research Centre from the Department of Education and Science in 2002 as part of the procedure by which schools were to be identified for inclusion in the proposed 16:1 Initiative (Weir and Archer 2005). Although that initiative was not introduced, similar procedures were subsequently adopted in the identification of second-level schools for DEIS (S. Weir, pers. comm.).

9. The year 1999/2000 is not shown in Figure 1 because equivalent figures for 1998/1999 are not available. Thus, the year-on-year change discussed here begins with the change from 1999/2000 to 2000/2001.

10. The Department of Education and Skills’ database includes 749 schools in the 2001/2002 school year. The 720 schools for which medical card information is available therefore represent about 96% of the total at the time. Of the complete list of 749 schools, 20 were Colleges or Institutes of Further Education with no Junior Cycle or TY students.

11. Readers are advised that a follow-up to Millar and Kelly's (1999) study is currently being organised by the Educational Research Centre. This study will draw on more recent Junior Certificate and Leaving Certificate data and will include a greater focus on disadvantage by examining student-level, in addition to school-level, indicators.