A Study of the Comparative Experiences of LCVP in Selected Schools.

The Leaving Certificate Vocational Programme (LCVP) is part of a range of curriculum reform at Senior Cycle. This dissertation explores the issues arising from the introduction and implementation of the LCVP into a selected number of schools with a particular focus on Saint Anne’s, the target school. In order to get a clear picture of the situation in these schools, a semi-structured interview was held with the Co-ordinator of each programme. This instrument was chosen as the most productive research approach since each co-ordinator, in theory, would be familiar with all aspects of the programme. In addition one of the Development Officers on the LCVP Support Team was interviewed in depth. The purpose of this interview was to gain an insight on implementation from a national perspective. Finally it was considered valuable to get the perspective of students as well as teachers. These consisted of two distinct groups, firstly Fifth Year students in the target school who had opted for the programme and secondly their peers who had decided against the programme or had not been eligible for inclusion. Their opinions were elicited by means of semi-structured interviews and questionnaires. The object of the research was to identify in what way the experience of the target school echoed that of the other schools and what factors were peculiar to Saint Anne’s. The introductory chapters of this dissertation set the context for the work by describing the changes in second-level education in Ireland since the sixties, emphasising particularly the growing pressure in the early 1990s to develop the vocational dimension of education. Some of the curricular initiatives introduced to address this need are described and the suite of programmes that emerged at Senior Cycle is presented with a particular emphasis on the rationale, content and assessment procedures of the LCVP. The focus of the research is then narrowed by describing the target school in some detail, particularly its experience of vocational initiatives and its involvement in curriculum innovation. The main body of the work analyses the experience of the four control schools in relation to that of the target school. A number of themes, identifying points of similarity and contrast between the target school and the others, are employed for comparative purposes. In addition, student responses are classified and analysed. All this information is set in a national context by the observations of the Development Officer. Finally the research sets these results in the context of the general literature of curriculum innovation. It concludes by offering some comments on the experience of the LCVP in the target school and implications for future policy