From Leaving CertiFiCate to Leaving SChooL a Longitudinal Study ...

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From Leaving Certificate to Leaving School
They’re kind of a waste of time.
Just a day off school.
… They’re really bad actually, all you do is walk around.
… And no one ever goes to the lectures, well I never did.
… It’s just to look and see what the college is like, it’s not actually to
see what courses they have. (Harris Street, girls’ school, middle-class
intake)
These students from Barrack Street attended just one open day and only
spent ten minutes in the college:
They sent us to an open day in one college that was about all.
That was it.
We went out ten minutes and came back … I only walked in one
door and walked out the other door. (Barrack Street, girls’ school,
working-class intake)
This group of students was also critical of not being allowed to attend
more than one open day.
5.2.2 One-to-one Guidance Counselling Sessions
Good quality individual career guidance is important to the development
of learning outcomes, such as career-related skills, especially opportunity
awareness, career exploration and decision-making skills (Morris et al.,
1999). In general, students were positive about one-to-one sessions with
their guidance counsellor since these provided an opportunity to discuss
their individual career plans. In Dawes Point, some of the students felt
that these one-to-one sessions directly helped them decide what to do
after school:
It’s [one-to-one career guidance] helped me decide like what I want
to do so I really wasn’t sure until I came in to the end of fifth year or
sixth year like, I was kind of, I didn’t really know what to do.
(Dawes Point, boys’ school, working-class intake)