Dr. Harold Hislop:

Originally, two types of historical data, in particular, were meant to have been included in the model. The Minister asked us to look at one of those types, and she made the decision this week to remove it from the data. That was the historical prediction, which would be a reflection of what leaving certificate scores would typically have been in each school, based on an historical pattern. The idea was that we would have used the data from the leaving certificate examinations of 2019, 2018 and 2017, combined those data and the mean of those data or the pattern of results we would normally expect on a school-by-school basis. We have those data and we could have used them. The disadvantage of using those data is that they place a strong emphasis on the historical pattern in each school. It is also a pattern of historical data that has been created by students other than those of 2020. It was for those reasons, as well as the lack of public acceptability and the experience of the overuse of these data in the United Kingdom, that led the Minister to decide to remove those data.

Some historical data still exist in the process, but it is historical data linked to the students themselves. The vast and most important data, therefore, are the estimated marks that the teachers thought students might have achieved.

It is historical data linked to the students themselves, so the vast and most important piece of data is the result of the estimated marks that the teachers thought students might have achieved. The students, though, themselves, of each class group, create a pattern of results in their own junior certificate results of three years ago, and it is that piece of data that allows one to make a prediction as to what those students ought to have achieved, if they had been able to sit a leaving certificate examination in the normal way. Clearly they were not. However, that data can be be very useful to us, and that is is what we used, combined with the teacher estimates, to produce an accurate prediction of what students should be able to achieve. In the United Kingdom, a huge emphasis was placed on making sure that the predictions were very tightly in line with what students would have achieved in historic data sets that the Minister ultimately removed. The consequence of that was a very severe and harsh downgrading of student marks, so that for instance, in England and Wales 40% of marks were downgraded; one third of them in Northern Ireland and in Scotland it was about one quarter. In Ireland, we have adopted an approach that places much greater emphasis on the students' estimated marks, and also on historic data from the junior certificate created by the students of 2020; not created by students from another group, in which these students of 2020 had no part.