Reaction to Leaving Certificate 2026 Maths Paper 2 (O) by Jean Kelly, Maths teacher at The Institute of Education.
- The ethos of this paper was to let student engage with their lives through a mathematical lens. It was less about doing maths and more about using the maths.
A fair, modern and thoughtfully designed paper that rewarded understanding over memorisation. In this case “fair” means that many students will have initially found the contexts unfamiliar but those that stayed, sat there, stayed calm and used their maths will have found themselves rewarded.
The paper feels like a bridge between project maths and the upcoming Leaving Cert. reforms with an emphasis on modelling, reasoning and real-life problem-solving. While some scenarios seemed novel the maths were short, snappy, without lengthy procedural problems. In Section B students could see glimpses of their own lives in as the exam reached into varied contexts. There was a question that used gaming as a way to examine a mixture of line and circle, appearing together for the first time as a long question. This blending of topics was a theme throughout, so students needed to move naturally between topics in every question. Elsewhere a question on a reality TV show contest mixed trig, sectors and the trapezoidal rule while statistics was covered via the guise of music festivals. Student needed to follow the story to find the maths. And of course very little geometry will be something that students will love.