Student Experiences of the Leaving Certificate Applied Programme

PROGRESSION TO FURTHER STUDY AND TRAINING 135Ringing people that just owed the company money like, just asking them to send itin and giving them the details, that’s all I was basically doing.And would it be something that you would think about goingback into again?I’d do it again, yeah. (Zoe, 22, dropped out of LCA, unemployed)8.3.3 EXPERIENCES IN ACCESSING HIGHER EDUCATIONWhile the School Leavers’ Survey data captures young people during thefirst two years after leaving school, the in-depth interviews involved youngpeople who had left school in 2004, thereby allowing a longer termperspective (typically four years after leaving school). This longer termreflection, meant that a number of the respondents who enrolled on PLCcourses on leaving school had subsequently progressed to higher education.One of the twenty-nine respondents went on to complete a degree in socialstudies when she finished the LCA and two PLC courses. Again, she founda lot of similarities between the structure and assessment of the LCA andher subsequent PLC, diploma and degree courses:Say after doing the, like LCA, it was the kind of thing, like you knew you hadto do [an] assignment, accredited marks throughout the year and then you didyour different modules and then at the end of it like, you get the pass, merit,distinction like…because Leaving Cert Applied was pass, merit, and distinctionlike. So it was…It’s like a training ground really.Yeah its like, the thing like, even now talking to people who are doing PLC’slike that would have just came in from the ordinary Leaving Cert they’re like,god, how did you do this like, there’s so much going on, but I think when you’rejust used to stuff like, knowing that you had a deadline, and if you didn’t have adeadline, or if you didn’t have something in by the deadline…your points weredown like, obviously they were that bit more lenient on it, they used to like passyou. But you knew once you got in to do something higher than your schoolinglike, they wouldn’t, so you’d have to have it in like. (Fiona, 25, completedLCA, employed)After completing her PLC and working in a playgroup for a further year,she applied for another PLC in Social Studies when she was 21 years ofage. It was at this time that she realised she wanted to do a degree andneeded to achieve distinction grades in her PLC course in order to secure aplace on the degree course. At the time of interview Fiona was employed asa social worker:I knew I wanted to work with people and I had heard about the course in [city]and I was like, okay, I really want to go back and, like…I got good enoughmarks [in the first PLC course] but it wasn’t like, you’d want to get distinctionsif you wanted to get into the likes of [name of IT], so I was like, now it’s my timelike, three years after finishing school…now I know that I can go on and dosomething else like and I’m prepared to work at what I want...I wanted a properjob in something and then I ended up going to [city] and I worked through thecourse and I got my ten distinctions and applied through the CAO and then gotinto [a degree course]. (Fiona, 25, completed LCA, employed)