Reaction to 2026 Leaving Certificate Politics & Society (Higher Level) by Paul McAndrew, Politics & Society teacher at The Institute of Education.
- There were plenty of topical issues, but students will have had to keep the course material in mind to keep relevant and balanced.
The paper begins with 15 short questions, of which students need to do 10. These were very topical, drawing together examples from the JAM Card initiative, presidential election ballots, the Consumer Price Index and even a prison overcrowding. Intriguingly certain topics (e.g. The Electoral Commission) were not directly on the syllabus were present on the exam and so students would have needed to quickly synthesise their study with a broader awareness of the world. In general, there was a greater emphasis on critical analysis in this section. While there were questions with more straightforward commands like “describe”, “state” or “give an example of…”, there were also prompts to “comment on” a given example. Such questions demand that students do more than recite definitions and so some will have found this assortment of short questions more challenging.
Moving into the compulsory data-based questions, the two documents related to portrayals of Africa through cultural and cartographic lenses. Again the questions mix the more straightforward comprehension style with discursive analytic skills. For example, Question C asked students to “explain what is meant by ‘maps are instruments of power’”. A clear effort to make the exam more challenging than previous years is evident here, but students who where able to think through the factors involved will be fine.
The final stretch of the exam are the essay questions, of which students needed to answer two. This year key thinkers were more prominent as both Edward Said and Martha Nussbaum appeared. The latter’s question would have been trickier as the need to cover Nussbaum’s Capabilities Approach for both human and sustainable development would push the 35 minute timeslot. There is so much that students needed to include that it would be hard to be succinct and to the point. Such rigour is essential when it comes to these tasks as tangents can be alluring. In the case of Question 3’s options on either the social contract or the state’s obligation to children’s rights, students likely have strong personal convictions on these topics, but they need to keep the remit of the course in mind. Students who kept their cool and took a balanced approach would notice that both these questions were effective paths to discuss education in Ireland, the Equal Status Act etc. A similar approach was essential for the patriarchy essay, but the question scaffolded that balance in a nice way. The final essay on “European Values” in Ireland was a nice reflection of our Presidency of the Council of Europe in July.