If you have a fifth year student, nobody may have mentioned Leaving Cert project work yet. You’re not alone. From September 2026, a second group of subjects joins the Leaving Cert reform that started a year earlier. In these subjects, a real chunk of the final grade now comes from project work. It’s no longer just a single written exam.
What’s Actually Changing
The State Examinations Commission calls these additional assessment components, but most parents just call them projects. Seven subjects, including business, biology, chemistry and physics, moved to this model in September 2025. The Irish Times described it at the time as the most significant Leaving Cert reforms in a century. From September 2026, English, geography, PE and accounting follow. In each of these subjects, at least 40% of the final mark comes from project work, practical tasks or a performance. That’s no longer decided only by the June exam.
Students typically get their project brief in January. They’re expected to put in roughly 20 hours of work over the following weeks, on top of everything else on their plate that term. For a student already juggling mocks, homework and a part-time job, those hours don’t appear out of nowhere. They have to be carved out deliberately, which is exactly where most families get caught off guard.
Why This Catches Families Off Guard
The stated aim of the reform is to reduce pressure by moving away from a single exam worth everything. In practice, a lot of parents I talk to feel the opposite in the short term. A written exam has one date and one format every student already understands. Project work has its own deadline and its own marking scheme, and it often feels less familiar as a result. It lands in the middle of ordinary coursework and mock exams rather than after them. Multiply that across two or three subjects doing project work in the same year. January to March can get crowded fast. Most families only discover this once the brief has already landed.
How to Get Ahead of It
There’s good news here. Project work rewards exactly the kind of planning I’ve spent 35 years teaching students to do for exams. Treat the 20 hours as several smaller sessions with their own mini-deadlines, not one long weekend near the due date. Get every project deadline for the year onto a single calendar as soon as briefs come out. That way clashes show up in January rather than in March. If a subject teacher raises concerns about how AI tools should or shouldn’t be used, ask early rather than guessing. Being upfront about process protects a student far more than trying to explain it after the fact.
It also helps to treat the first project as a trial run for the rest. Whatever routine works, a set evening each week, a particular corner of the kitchen table, tends to carry over to the second and third project. Friction drops noticeably once a habit is set. Students rarely need to relearn the process each time once the first one has gone reasonably well.
A Practical Checklist to Start With
A few concrete steps make the whole process less daunting. First, write every project deadline for every subject onto one calendar as soon as briefs are issued. Don’t rely on just the subject’s own diary. Second, break the 20 hours into four or five sessions of roughly four hours each. Spread them across several weeks rather than cramming into one weekend. Third, agree a fixed weekly slot with your child for project work specifically, separate from ordinary homework time, so it doesn’t get squeezed out. Fourth, build in a short review point roughly halfway through, where a teacher or parent glances over progress and flags anything off track while there’s still time to fix it. None of these steps take long to set up, but together they prevent most of the last-minute panic that catches families out.
The Skill Underneath Hasn’t Changed
A written paper and a project brief ask for the same thing underneath. The students who cope best know how to break a big task into a working plan, and they stick to it under pressure. That’s the same organizational skill covered in Boost Your Academic Productivity, and it’s worth revisiting now if project work is new to your house this year. The format of Leaving Cert assessment is changing. What actually gets a student through it well hasn’t, and that’s worth holding onto when the newness of it all feels overwhelming.If this kind of planning doesn’t come naturally to your child, it’s exactly what I work on with students in one-to-one study coaching, building the organisational habits that carry across every project and every exam. Feel free to get in touch if you’d like to talk it through.
