Your education questions answered

I am hoping you can help my daughter. She will be sitting her Leaving Cert next June. She would really like to do law in Dublin (it has to be Dublin), but she does not think she will get the points. Her only other option is an arts degree and then an LLB after that. She may get in the region of 450 to 460 points, which will see her through to arts. What is available for her? Can you give any advice, as she does not have access to a guidance counsellor in her school?

There are a number of points I would like to raise. They concern your daughter's desire to study law, her belief that she will not achieve her points target, your insistence that she study in Dublin and the fact that she does not have access to a guidance counsellor in her school.

As you are probably aware, large numbers of students drop out of third-level courses each year for many reasons. One of them is that the student has failed to explore his/her interests and aptitudes. Given that your daughter has no access to a guidance counsellor, I would be concerned that she has not properly researched her interest in law. Has she, for instance, had an opportunity to undertake work experience in a solicitor's office?

As a guidance counsellor advising a student about her CAO application, I would give a number of simple pieces of advice. Apply for what you want, in the order you want it, without any expectation of what the points might be in the coming year or about how you might perform in the Leaving Cert. There are so many variables in both the CAO system and any student's individual performance. Nobody knows how many students will apply to the CAO this year. It is likely to be fewer than last year because of the decreasing birth rate through the 1980s. Nobody knows how many of this year's student group will apply for law courses and nobody knows how the students who do apply will perform in the Leaving Cert.

I am always amused when students or their parents tell me that studying outside Dublin is not an option. In some cases it may be an economic issue, where a parent simply cannot afford to pay the accommodation costs of a child away from home. In most cases it is simply an unwillingness to consider other options.

My advice to your daughter would be to consider listing every law course on her CAO application. If she is eventually offered a place, she can then visit the college and decide whether she would like to take up the offer. If she does not list the courses, she may be offered nothing.

I would suggest that your daughter log on to the Institute of Guidance Counsellors' CAO database and research her options further. You will find this online at www.qualifax.ie.

Finally, regarding your daughter's lack of a guidance counsellor. Every school is allocated a minimum of eight hours of guidance counselling per week. The majority of schools - with between 250 and 500 students - have an allocation of 11 hours per week. Schools with over 500 students get a full-time guidance counsellor.

If your daughter has no access to one, she should. There are only a small number of schools which do not provide guidance hours to their students. I have passed on their details to the Department of Education and Science.

Brian Mooney is president of the Institute of Guidance Counsellors. You can e-mail him your questions to bmooney@irish-times.ie