I am a TY student and I am doing my work experience with this newspaper, and I am strongly in support of the motion that TY provides valuable experience to students.
Before I delve into the "how" of why it is a good idea to join this programme after Third Year instead of Fifth Year, it is required that I explain what TY is, as it is a relatively new addition to the Secondary School System.
TY is a special, optional year for students that gives them an opportunity to expand their working skills and social skills, and success is gauged by participation in a large field of activities. Students are required to write a portfolio, which is a summary of everything they do during the year, as well as a CV. This makes it unique among other Years of Secondary School, most of which focus on academic success in exams and tests set by the Education Department.
While there are tests in TY, they are considerably less important and prevalent, and this encourages TY students to work well throughout the year as there are important things to do throughout the year.
This is a distinct characteristic of TY in comparison to the other Years, where some terms are considered to be less important than others. These unimportant terms often lead to students slacking, because they decide to procrastinate working hard at school until the big exams. This means students often fail to build up their academic skills by the time the state exams happen.
In TY, that problem does not exist. The things students will be doing at the start of the year are quite similar to what they will do at the end, so students will get a better experience of learning. Also, teachers are now motivated by the system to try and teach the full curriculum, instead of only focusing on the parts that are highly relevant to the exams, and knowing the full structure of something is always better than simply knowing the more "crucial" half.
Many parents and pupils mistakenly believe that TY will be a "doss" year. It is only a doss if that belief is the one you work with. Even if you think of it as a long break before Fifth Year, there is nothing stopping students from using it a chance to know both the Academic and Job Worlds better, for even if a student learns 10% from TY when they learned 100% in all the other years, they are still at an advantageous position compared to someone who learned 100% in all their years of Secondary School, but did not take the chance of joining TY, because a Venn Diagram would be able to show you that the set of years the second student participated in, and the grades they received, is a subset of the first student's years and the grades they received.
