At primary school level, the Social and Environmental Education (SEE) curriculum helps children develop a wide range of skills and encourages them to adopt open, critical and responsible attitudes, including caring for animals.
Relationships is one of the eight overarching principles of learning, teaching and assessment in the redeveloped primary curriculum. Within the SEE curriculum, this principle includes fostering respectful and caring relationships with all living things, including animals, and understanding that people, plants and animals depend on one another. Children learn how to care for and respect animals and explore ways they can take action to protect their environment.
Teachers can also draw on support materials and programmes from organisations such as the Dublin Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (DSPCA), which offers free primary school programmes and facilitates educational visits for schools.
At post primary, the Junior Cycle Framework and the Transition Year Programme statement provide flexibility, and it is a matter for schools to decide which subjects they wish to offer.
When planning a Junior cycle and TY programme, whether within schools or other educational settings, there is flexibility to respond to the needs and context of their students. In any specific location where the care of horses is of local concern schools may develop a short course, or a unit of learning in JC to directly address this or they can develop transition unit within their TY programme.
There is also a Level 2 Short course for Junior Cycle: A Personal Project: Caring for Animals. This short course builds on and promotes the development of a range of personal, social and practical skills in the context of learning about an animal of special interest to the student. As well as content knowledge, students develop essential skills such as those of communication and language; thinking and reasoning; labelling; classifying; comparison and inferring. Knowledge, skills and attitudes for life are developed through links with the community, creative projects, numeracy, communication and literacy.
One of the Leaving Certificate subject options available is Biology. Leaving Certificate Biology students develop a critical awareness of the impact of humankind's decisions on the living world - from our societal impact on species and ecosystems to the personal decisions that influence our health and wellness. They draw on their knowledge and understanding of a number of specified core concepts from different areas of biology to evaluate and use arguments about the place of biology in society. They develop an appreciation of the significance of biology in personal, social, environmental, economic and technological contexts and an awareness of advances in technology, relevant to biology.
