Two live lessons every week for Leaving Cert Higher Level, worked from the State Examinations Commission marking schemes. Most students who lose marks at this level understand the material perfectly well. They lose them somewhere between knowing it and getting it onto the page.
Seven days free. No card required.
The whole course, taught across the year rather than crammed at the end. Every lesson is recorded and indexed by topic, so any method can be found again the night before a test.
Review weeks at Halloween, Christmas and Easter, mock support in February, and pre-exam revision every week to the exam.
Look at a strong student’s mock paper and you usually find someone who understands the course perfectly well and is giving away 30 or 40 marks a paper on things that have nothing to do with understanding. Parts left blank because the opening did not come immediately. A whole question abandoned after a slip in part (a). Correct answers with no working, on parts where the scheme is paying for the working.
That is what makes Higher Level tractable in a way students do not expect. The marks being lost are habit marks, and habits move faster than knowledge. A student who starts writing something relevant on every part, and who keeps going after an error rather than stopping, moves grades without learning a single new topic.
Which is why lessons here are built around the marking scheme rather than around a topic list. Understanding is the entry requirement at this level, not the goal.
Paper 1 is where the algebraic spine sits: algebra, complex numbers, sequences and series, functions, and calculus. Differentiation and integration carry a large share of the marks and are the topics most often half-learned. A student who can differentiate on demand, but has never been comfortable with what the derivative means, will meet that gap in every applied question.
Paper 2 is coordinate geometry, trigonometry, the theorems, probability and statistics. Proof questions and the trigonometric identities are the two places Higher Level students most often decide, quietly, to skip. That is a decision worth making deliberately rather than in the exam hall.
Both papers split into Section A and Section B, and Section B is where Higher Level students lose most. A long, wordy Section B question is very often three ordinary Section A skills wearing a costume; the skill being tested is recognising which topic it really is, and that is trainable.
This is the question nearly every Higher Level family arrives with, usually in fifth year and usually in the months when the course is hardest and least rewarding.
The arithmetic that matters: Higher Level maths carries 25 additional CAO points at H6 or above, and a H6 is a pass. The bonus is not a reward for a top grade. It is a reward for staying in the room. So the real comparison is rarely "can I get a H1"; it is "am I better off at H6 with the bonus than at O1 without it". For a great many students the honest answer is yes, and they drop anyway.
Staying is more often a support problem than an ability problem: the course gets hard at a point in the year when class has moved on and there is nowhere to ask. That specific gap is what this is for, with two lessons a week at a fixed time and a board where a question at nine on a Tuesday gets answered.
And if the honest answer for your child is that Ordinary Level is the right course, that is a real decision and not a failure. It is worth reading the Ordinary Level page rather than treating it as the fallback.
Seven days free first, with no card. Cancel any time, no joining fee.
Recordings and notes, no live lessons.
or €290 for the academic year
Two live lessons a week, plus everything above.
or €690 for the academic year
Everything in Academy, three mock papers marked a year, and an extra live session each month on whatever students vote to cover.
or €990 for the academic year
No. The class teaches the full Higher Level course, and most of what it fixes (attempt marks, method marks, not abandoning questions) moves a H5 to a H3 just as much as a H2 to a H1. Students aiming to pass Higher for the bonus points are exactly who it is built for.
The full course is recorded and indexed by topic, so catching up is a matter of watching the topics they missed rather than waiting for them to come round again. Joining part-way through the year is normal here.
On Platinum, three mock papers a year marked against the SEC scheme, with the student’s specific recurring errors named and a written study plan. At Higher Level this is the highest-value thing on offer, because the losses are usually invisible to a student marking their own paper generously.
Fifth year is the better place to start. Most of what goes wrong in sixth year is fifth-year Higher Level material that was never secure, met again under time pressure. Starting in sixth year works, but you are then teaching and revising at once.
Marking, mostly. At Higher Level the losses are usually spread thin across the whole paper: a step of working left out here, a part abandoned after one slip there. None of it looks like a problem on its own, which is exactly why it survives a year of revision. What names it is somebody marking a full paper against the scheme and telling the student the pattern, which is what the three marked mocks on Platinum are for.