Barbie to be on the 2026 Leaving Cert Curriculum

Barbie’s iconic status transcends the toy box and joins the much debated English Curriculum

With the announcement that Barbie will be featured on the 2026 Leaving Cert curriculum, the Irish educational landscape is set for a colourful transformation. While juggling a list of subscribed poets and a selected Shakespearean text, students will be given the opportunity to explore the impact of this iconic doll on paper. However, is this addition a welcome one, or is it just contributing to an already broad and heavy variety of texts available to study? Let’s discuss!

As a student teacher, I take an extreme interest in any changes to the curriculum which offers students the opportunity to explore new and upcoming texts; and with the world-wide success of Greta Gerwigs ‘Barbie’, It is no wonder that it is the latest text to join the English Leaving Cert. The English Leaving Cert course can at the best of times feel like a race against the clock to see who can regurgitate and articulate the most information in the shortest amount of time. And while this of course provides a means to an end, it should not be the way students look at Leaving Cert English. English is one of the rare subjects that allows students to explore their own thoughts and opinions on different texts, and ponder and think over certain issues. This is why I believe the addition of Barbie is a welcome change. 

Given the movie’s enduring popularity and cultural significance, I believe studying Barbie can provide insights into contemporary societal values and trends. As it would be studied alongside other selected texts in the comparative section of the exam, students will have to creatively and critically find comparisons between the different texts in order to achieve maximum marks. The key to any comparative is having clear fluidity between your texts. And with texts like Jane Austens ‘Pride and Prejudice’, Bonnie Garmus’s ’Lessons in Chemistry’ and Marina Carr’s ‘Girl on the altar’’ all being available to study for the 2026 exam, Barbie is sure to fit it. 

However, adding Barbie to the leaving cert curriculum also poses its own set of unique challenges. As the movie is just short of two hours, students and teachers will have the difficulty of condensing down the movie. They will have to be careful to only include key moments that are pivotal for not only their own essays, but also for the understanding of the examiner. Barbie also presents a complex and broad range of character arcs and storylines, so students will have to be careful not to include unnecessary information. Barbie as a literary text operates as an overall metaphor for the way women are perceived within our society and while this is not difficult to understand from the movie, students will have to be clever in the way they choose their quotes in order to capture this complicated web of dialogue. And, to make matters worse, students will have to achieve all of the above within less than an hour. Yeah, not ideal.

Taking on Barbie as a literary text is definitely a challenge, but if students are able to  succeed in striking a good balance between the text and their opinion, all the hard work will be richly rewarded. I believe the addition of Barbie is definitely a welcome one, and I hope this new trend in the English Curriculum continues to introduce a range of modern texts in the future. 

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