Spanish continues to increase in popularity as an option for secondary school students in Ireland. This can be seen from the examination figures provided by the Department of Education, who have released figures for students who sat the state exams in June 2025.
With 11663 students doing the Leaving Cert Spanish exam (compared to 10309 in 2024 and 10094 in 2023) and 19369 taking the Junior Cycle Spanish exam, Spanish has once again closed the gap to French – which remains the most popular langauge to study in Ireland.
In percentage terms, over 13% more students did the Spanish exam in 2025 compared to a year earlier. In the same period, French increased by 1% with German decreasing by over 2%.
In the Junior Cycle, there was a 5% increase in the year-on-year Spanish numbers, with a 6.5% decrease in the corresponding French numbers.
For the first time since 2015, the number of students who did French in the Leaving Cert increased from the previous year – up 189 students from 2024. This can be partly explained by a significant increase in the number of total Leaving Certificate students, which increased from 56791 in 2024 to 60937 in 2025.
Leaving Cert German declined for the fifth year in a row. In 2020, 8701 students sat a German Leaving Cert paper, but this number fell to 6862 students in 2025.
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/statistics/?l=en&mc=st&sc=ryr&yr=r25
If these numbers interest you, view our complete analysis here – from 2008 to 2025.
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