There has been a dramatic fall in the number of students failing maths in their Leaving Certificate.

Almost 4,000 failed maths this year which is down by 20% on recent years.

And even more remarkably only 256 students of the 11,000-plus who took higher level maths failed the paper.

The Education Minister has congratulated the 55,000 candidates who sat the Leaving Certificate this year and who are getting their results today.

A total of 55,815 students sat their Leaving Cert this year.

Overall 3 students earned 9 ‘A1′ grades, 10 scored 8 ‘A1′s, and 150 students around the country managed to get 6 or more A1′s giving them the magic number of 600 points.

This is down about 3.2% on the number last year.

Of these 52,589 sat the Established Leaving Cert and Leaving Cert Vocational Programme and 3,226 sat the Leaving Cert Applied Programme.

The highest number of students ever sat higher level maths in 2012.

22.1% of all maths students took the higher level paper compared to 15.8% last year.

The Minister has welcomed this dramatic increase.

The other main change this year was in Irish where the oral component of the exam which now accounts for 40% of the marks awarded.

The number of students taking higher level Irish has also increased by almost 11% compared to last year.

President Michael D. Higgins is congratulating the students who got their results today.

He says “today is one important moment in their lives” and he has “every confidence that young people will develop all of their talents in different ways”.

However concerns have been expressed about the drop in numbers taking physics.

Only 11% of Leaving Cert students studied physics for the exam which is down 2% from 2011.

But these students from various schools around the country are happy with their results.