Donnchadh Ó Laoghaire (Cork South Central, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I thank the witnesses for attending this afternoon.

We all know the Department was left in an invidious position earlier in the year regarding the public health crisis and the exams. It has been my view, and I communicated this to the former Minister for Education and Skills, Deputy McHugh, that using calculated grades was not the right approach. Unfortunately, students who worked extremely hard and effectively gave up a year of their lives did not get the results for which they were hoping. They were able to look at the teacher grades, however, and see that the results they received were not what their teachers thought they deserved either.

That was exacerbated by the error in the coding. I still find it difficult to fathom how that error managed to slip through, given that this process was meant to have been reviewed and tested. Before Mr. Tattan answers, it is important we acknowledge that two Departments and multiple agencies were involved with last year's leaving certificate examinations and the fallout from that process. I hope, therefore, that Mr. Tattan will acknowledge in his answers that there is still a responsibility on the Department of Education to make this good for those students who were failed by the coding error and by the model as a whole.

I have a million questions, but I will send most of them in an email. I will focus on just three. Some 8,000 higher grades were issued. Does Mr. Tattan acknowledge that there was a ripple effect for other students? The CAO is a system which ranks order in allocating courses. There will be a round of that process in February after the leaving certificate examinations in November. I raised this question with the Minister for Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science, Deputy Harris, as well. Have there been discussions between the two Departments regarding whether it would be possible to provide deferred offers to those students who lost out on courses because they were pushed out by those with higher grades? Is it possible to undertake the mathematical exercise of excluding the error and running not the entire CAO process, which has already allocated places, but a process to figure out what points those students affected would have had if the error had not taken place and if they can now be offered deferred places? I think that would be a way of making things good for those students who worked extremely hard, who may have lost out because of the error and who were looking at their teachers' grades and wondering how it went wrong.

The November examinations will have a relatively small cohort, some 2,800 students. It is an atypical cohort. From my experience, these are people who have missed out on courses with high points and who are now taking the earliest opportunity to try to remedy that situation. Most students are taking one or two subjects, and not all. It would seem perverse to apply the usual standardisation, the bell curve, in that situation. There is no way it can match the standardisation of previous years. I hope that will not be the case, but perhaps Mr. Tattan can enlighten me.

A practical issue already rising and causing issues concerns those students who have already missed out. I refer in particular to those interested in studying medicine because that is a competitive and hard area. As I said, some of what has happened was because of the model and the errors. The health professions admission test, HPAT, to get into medicine is already demanding enough. Considering the fallout from this situation, therefore, surely the Department of Education can have some discussions with the universities and the other Department to ensure that the results from this year's HPAT can be carried over. I think that is an important remedy.