Mr. Aidan Farrell:

First, in terms of our interaction with the school system our role as the State Examinations Commission is to provide a national service to over 120,000 candidates every year. We operate in partnership with the education system so we work closely with school management, principals and teachers and then provide the service to the candidate. Regarding interaction with and feedback from stakeholders, that happens every day in our day-to-day business in the delivery of the examinations. Students are entered for the examinations through their schools. In the Irish system and tradition schools take a strong advocacy role on behalf of their students and interact with us in terms of providing the national service in a strong advocacy way with regard to particular issues arising for individual candidates, class groupings or at a broader system level, if they see that as important.

We also engage with teachers through teacher unions and subject associations. Immediately after every examination takes place in June we get feedback from the subject association for that particular subject. There is also feedback organised through the national media. There is a strong focus in Ireland on the examinations so there is a high level of reporting on them every year. There might be a separate debate there regarding the stress levels that might generate, but there is that strong level of feedback to us and the examination system in terms of how students have encountered the particular examination, how they have experienced it and the professional educator's view on it. That is important feedback for us because it helps us in framing the marking scheme that will ultimately be applied to students' work. In the Irish context we do not pre-set examination questions and pre-test them in advance of the examinations whereby we can test the standard of questions or how students will respond to them. Our question setters will have an expectation of how students will respond to a particular test item but that can change in terms of what actually happens in the examination hall. There can be a different experience. We get feedback from the individual teachers, the expert teachers operating through the media and through the subject associations. We will often get feedback directly from candidates or their parents if the candidates have had a particularly nervous or upsetting experience during the examination. These are all factors we take into account in framing the marking scheme.