Caoimhe Murphy (18) will walk into her first Leaving Certificate exam on Wednesday morning not only stressed about what might come up, but how she will answer the questions in the time allowed. Murphy is a student at St Kevin’s Community School in Dunlavin, Co Wicklow, and was diagnosed with severe dyslexia and dyspraxia at eight years of age. She struggles particularly with expressive language, which makes written exams difficult.“You wouldn’t know by her because she is a confident, kind, caring, soft, gentle girl. But, for instance, if she reads a book, she can take it all in, understand everything that’s going on, but if you asked her to tell you in detail everything that happened in that book, it’s very difficult for her,” her mother Anita Reid Murphy says. The fact that she will receive a hard copy of her exam paper, but will write her answers in soft copy through her laptop, makes things even more difficult, her mother says. “This requires constant switching between paper and screen, manually typing headings, question numbers, roman numerals, tables and formatting instructions before even answering the actual exam question,” Reid Murphy says.“Students with dyslexia and dyspraxia are therefore being tested not only on subject knowledge, but also on formatting, navigation, organisation, sequencing, transcription accuracy and IT management under exam conditions. The room for error is enormous.”More than 140,000 Leaving and Junior Cycle students will turn the page on their English exam at 9.30am on Wednesday, kicking off the 2026 exam season that finishes on Tuesday, June 23rd with applied mathematics at Leaving Cert level.Roughly one quarter of these students, or 30,000, will receive an accommodation in the exams through the Reasonable Accommodations at Certificate Examinations (RACE) scheme.The arrangement is designed to help students with special educational needs who have difficulty in communicating what they know to an examiner because of a physical, visual, hearing and/or learning difficulty. Some of these accommodations can include reading assistance, scribes, voice-activated computers and being able to take the exam in a hospital. The scheme is under review by the State Examinations Commission and at the start of 2026 a pilot measure was introduced giving RACE students an extra 10 minutes in each exam. This is a provisional measure that will be reviewed before the 2027 exams. Reid Murphy says the 10 minutes is “frankly insulting” to students like Caoimhe.“It isn’t even proper compensation for further reading of their papers, never mind the battle that they have with their assistive technology, labelling, structuring and working between hard copy and their laptop. Ten minutes is absolutely nothing,” she says.Students who answer their written exams in Irish can get bonus marks of up to 10 per cent in certain subjects.Reid Murphy believes a similar solution should be rolled out for dyslexic students this year to acknowledge the difficulty they will face.“If they can’t get a proper system in place for these children, they need to give them an interim compensatory measure, such as the ones for the children who sit their exams in Irish.“It’s already there, it would be quick to implement, and it would be some recognition of being completely disadvantaged in the State exams,” she says.“This would not be about giving neurodivergent students an unfair advantage. It would be about acknowledging that the current system already places them at an unfair disadvantage from the outset.”Reid Murphy has written to Minister for Education Hildegarde Naughton seeking fully digital and accessible examination systems and a percentage adjustment to their marks similar to those for students who take the exam through Irish. She has not received a response. Announcing the additional 10 minutes in exam time for RACE students in January, Naughton said it was “an important step forward in ensuring that students with specific needs are supported in a fair, consistent and effective way”.“The State Examinations Commission intends to build on this year’s arrangements for 2027 and beyond, drawing on the findings of the ongoing research and the learning that emerges from the 2026 scheme,” Naughton said.