The Prodigal

On the year-1 roadmap. Editorial work hasn't started yet — vote to push it up the queue.

About the Leaving Cert curriculum

The Leaving Certificate is Ireland's school-leaving qualification, and Higher Level English is the most-taken Higher Level subject every year. The course runs across two papers totalling six hours; the literature components include a single text (a Shakespeare play most cohorts), a comparative study across three texts of different modes, and a prescribed-poetry section where students answer on one of five prescribed poets from a rotating list of eight. Recent rotations have included Yeats, Heaney, Bishop, Plath, Dickinson, Hopkins, Larkin, Frost, Donne, Boland, Kavanagh, Mahon, Durcan, and Ní Chuilleanáin. The single-text choices commonly include Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, All My Sons, and Brian Friel's Translations; the comparative list rotates between Pride and Prejudice, Wuthering Heights, How Many Miles to Babylon?, The Plough and the Stars, and Philadelphia, Here I Come. The Leaving Cert prescribed-poetry section is taught with a level of depth no other UK or Irish board demands at school-leaving age, which is why Irish departments tend to invest in long-form poet study rather than anthology-cluster shopping. Storgy's Leaving Cert coverage is poet-major: each prescribed poet gets a full library of canonical poems with close reading, biographical context, theme threads across the poet's work, and Higher Level model essays at the H1 / H2 band.