Student Experiences of the Leaving Certificate Applied Programme

SCHOOL EXPERIENCES AND LEARNING PROCESSES AMONG LCA PARTICIPANTS 63In contrast, some young people who had attended larger schoolsreported having more of a choice:They gave us a choice, they had about eight different classes … there was likedrama and stuff like that, arts and crafts and things, so you picked your twofavourite and then the majority of it came out. (Sarah, 21, completed LCA,employed)Figure 5.3: Take-up of Vocational Specialism Courses by Gender, 200780.060.0%40.020.00.0Tourism ICT Childcare Crafts & Design Graphics/Const.StudiesHair/Beauty Engineering Agric./Hort.MaleFemaleSource: DES Education Statistics database.There appears to be a degree of gendering in the take-up of vocationalspecialism courses within LCA (see Figure 5.3). Childcare and Hair/Beautyare disproportionately taken by young women. Furthermore, while asignificant minority of males take Hotel/ Catering/ Tourism, females aremuch more likely to do so. In contrast, Graphics/Construction Studies andEngineering are disproportionately taken by young men. ICT is the onlyvocational specialism course which appears broadly ‘gender neutral’ inprofile. Such gendering was also evident among the study respondents; themost popular subjects for female respondents were traditional vocationalsubjects such as hair and beauty, craft and design and childcare. For malerespondents, technology, construction and engineering were more popular.In keeping with previous research on gendered attitudes to technologicalsubjects (Darmody and Smyth, 2005), some of the young women dislikedthe traditionally ‘male’ subjects, feeling they were too physically demandingas well as irrelevant to their longer term career plans:That [Engineering] was horrible now … us girls just couldn’t do it like … Eventhe lads would say it is a bit hard, you know, filing down metal you know, it’svery hard. There was kind of no purpose to it, we were never going to be usingthat again. … None of the girls liked that now. (Deirdre, 23, completedLCA, home duties)We done Construction, Agriculture, like Construction I’d never think of doingthat after. … The Construction one now was, like you know, it was somethingthat wouldn’t even interest me nowAnd the other girls, would they be the same?Yeah, all of them, like it wouldn’t interest anyone like. (Linda, 21, completedLCA, student)