Spanish courses in Spain for Irish secondary school students

Exam student


It’s time for our annual look at the number of students taking Spanish in the Irish State examinations.

Every year, the CSS team has a look at the number of students in Ireland who take French, German and Spanish as part of the Junior Certificate and Leaving Certificate. We do this to look at trends to see which languages are growing in popularity, and by how much.

All our data has been taken from the State Examinations Commission website, under the “State Examinations Statistics” part of their website:
https://www.examinations.ie/?l=en&mc=st&sc=r23

The headline facts that stand out for us from the 2023 statistics are as follows:

  • For the first time ever, over 10,000 students took the Spanish exam for the Leaving Certificate.
  • For the first time in at least 20 years, since the Department of Education started publishing figures on their website, fewer than 20,000 students took the French exam for the Leaving Certificate.
  • Spanish is now clearly ahead of German in the number of students who take the Leaving Cert.
  • The number of students who took the Spanish Leaving Cert paper increased for the fifth year in a row (and the 14th year in the last 15 years).
  • The number of students who took the French Leaving Cert paper declined for the eighth year in a row (and the 13th year in the last 15 years).

In terms of total numbers, 10,094 students did the Spanish Leaving Cert paper, 19,831 did French and 7,858 did German.

In terms of total numbers, 17,160 students did the Spanish Junior Cert paper, 28,872 did French and 11,209 did German.

Looking at a long term picture, Spanish has increased by 240% in the 2008-2023 period, while French has decreased by 28% in the same period.

If these numbers interest you, view our complete analysis here – from 2008 to 2023.