Ms Andrea Feeney:

On the appeals and how many appeals are outstanding, we are stage 3 of a three-stage appeal process. Stages 1 and 2 have already been concluded. We had 12,000 students who made an application for a review of about 33,000 results. It was a technical process-based appeal looking at issues with the transmission of the data through the process and checking all of the points of data transfer. The professional judgement of the teachers was outside of the scope of the appeal process so if a student felt that a teacher had underestimated his or her performance, that could not be accessed through the appeal process. That was part of the compact with teachers in agreeing to engage in the calculated grades process to begin with. The statistical standardisation process was also outside of the scope of the appeals process. As a result of the processing of the stage 1 and the stage 2 appeals process, there were 18 upgrades. From those 33,000 individual subjects, there were 18 upgrades. There is a stage 3 appeals process which is for a referral of the procedures that were undertaken by the calculated grades executive office in the processing of the appeals to independent appeal scrutineers. Approximately 400 of the 12,000 students have undertaken that option and have made an application for further review against 900 of their grades. That process is under way but we cannot say how long it will take. Each stage of this has been new so it is a little bit uncertain how long the process will take. As soon as we know, we will alert students to that.

I refer to students who were studying either one or all of their subjects outside of school, either with a tutor or completely on their own. My colleague, Mr. Tattan, has already referred to the fact that every effort was made to accommodate those students within the process. As a result of our processing, for the students who were total out-of-school learners, we had 173 cases where we could not provide them with calculated grades in any of the subjects in which they were entered. We had 21 cases where they were part approved or part refused. We had 51 students who did not want to get calculated grades and opted out of the process and there were about 135 students who we contacted on a repeated basis over the summer about their applications and where we had no engagement in return. It is interesting that of the 2,800 students who will sit examinations starting next Monday, about 200 of those are in that category where they were studying all or some of their subjects outside of school. They have returned for the November exams and none of them has appeals ongoing. We have gone through as many procedures as we can with them and we have looked for every opportunity available to engage with them to make sure they were aware of the process but ultimately, for reasons of inter-candidate equity and to make sure we were treating other students fairly, we had to have a basis on which we could ground a calculated grade. There had to be some evidence available to us in order for us to look at running that information through the estimation process. I hope that answers the Deputy's question.