n mid-July 2018, as part of a review of career guidance provision in schools, the economic consultants charged by the Minister with the task invited a cross-section of people to a day-long consultative event in Farmleigh in the Phoenix Park, Dublin. This followed an earlier invitation for public submissions. A striking feature of the day was participants’ focus on work experience placements at second and third level. Embedded in those conversations seemed to be a strong recognition by educators and other stakeholders that Transition Year (TY) is widely accepted as a vibrant, integral component of the Irish education system. And yet doubts linger. For the first twenty years of Transition Year there was little evidence the programme would ever move beyond a quirky, marginal anomaly thought up by a strong-willed Minister for Education who didn’t consult anyone about his innovation (Jeffers, 2015, p.97). One of Minister Richard Burke’s concerns back in 1974 was the large number of early school-leavers. He also saw the secondary school system as conservative and described the Department of Education as ‘demoralised’. He disliked the divisions and inequalities in schooling. ‘Something subversive was needed,’ he told me in a 2001 interview. And so Transition Year was born.