If you’re the parent of a Junior Cert or Leaving Cert student in Ireland, you’ve probably noticed something: the stress in your house isn’t really about any one subject. It’s about the exam itself: the size of it, the finality of it, and the sense that everything rests on a few weeks in May and June.
That feeling is common. It isn’t a sign that something has gone wrong with your child, and it usually isn’t a sign that they haven’t studied enough. In 35 years working in Irish second-level education, the pattern I’ve seen again and again is this: it’s rarely the weakest students who struggle most under exam pressure. It’s often the most conscientious ones, the students who put in the hours and still feel like it isn’t enough.
Surveys of Leaving Cert students have found that around three in four report “extreme” stress across the two-year cycle, and more than seven in ten report anxiety linked directly to exam pressure. Over half say the pressure has led to an actual mental or physical health issue. And the anxiety doesn’t start in sixth year. Principals and teachers report rising anxiety from the earliest years of secondary school, well before a student ever sits a State exam.
None of that means the Leaving Cert or Junior Cert is unmanageable. It means the missing piece for most students isn’t more hours of subject content. It’s study skills: knowing how to revise efficiently, how to structure an exam answer under time pressure, and how to keep panic from blocking out information a student knows perfectly well the night before.
Grinds vs. study skills: what’s actually missing?
Grinds have become a serious industry here. Nearly half of Leaving Cert students now attend them, and the market is estimated at around €60 million a year. Grinds aren’t the enemy, and for a student who’s genuinely behind on specific content, they can help. But research increasingly shows that grinds attendance tracks with household income as much as it does with academic need, and a growing share of students attend not because they’re at risk of failing, but to chase a higher grade they might get anyway.
The honest answer, after decades watching this play out in real exam halls, is that a student who doesn’t know how to manage a three-hour paper, or who blanks under pressure, won’t fix that with more of the same content delivered the same way. What actually moves the needle is teaching the underlying skill of studying and sitting exams, a skill that applies across every subject a student takes, not just the one they’re getting grinds in.
Junior Cert (Junior Cycle): building the habits early
The Junior Cycle doesn’t carry the same points weight as the Leaving Cert, but it’s where study habits, or the lack of them, get set. Students who go into Transition Year and fifth year without ever having been shown how to plan a revision timetable, take usable notes, or manage their own time tend to arrive at the Leaving Cert with the same gaps, just under far higher stakes. Junior Cert is the right time to build:
- A simple, realistic weekly study routine, not a rigid schedule nobody sticks to
- Active revision methods such as self-testing and summarising from memory, instead of passive re-reading and highlighting
- Basic exam technique: reading the question properly, timing each section, and not freezing when a paper looks unfamiliar
Leaving Cert: where the stakes and the stress peak
By fifth and sixth year, the pressure compounds. Points, CAO choices, and the sense that this exam decides everything all pile on at once. A few things genuinely help.
Recall is a skill worth practising, not just hoping for. Anxiety blocks access to information under pressure, and the way to counter that is repeated practice under timed, exam-like conditions, so the brain has already done the job of retrieving information under pressure before it matters. Time management in the exam hall is also a separate skill from knowing the material. Running out of time on a paper is usually a technique problem rather than a knowledge problem, and it’s trainable. And motivation that depends on fear or lectures tends to stop working by the mid-teens. The students who cope best are the ones who’ve found their own reason to care, not just their parents’.
The role parents play, and it might surprise you
One detail that surprises almost every parent I talk to: research from clinical psychologists suggests parents often experience more exam stress than their children do. A tense household, however well-intentioned, tends to add pressure rather than relieve it. The single most useful thing a parent can do isn’t a study technique at all. It’s staying calm, practical and encouraging in a house that’s quietly anxious about the Leaving Cert or Junior Cert, without ever pretending the exam doesn’t matter.
Where to go from here
If your son or daughter is heading into Junior Cert or Leaving Cert this year and the study skills piece is missing, or exam stress and anxiety are already showing up at home, that’s exactly what Study Skills Ireland is built to address, through in-school student workshops and parent talks like The Best Your Child Can Be, delivered across Ireland.
Get in touch: call 086 677 2154, or email info@endaodoherty.ie to check availability for your school or parents’ association.
