Ms Andrea Feeney:

I thank the Senator for her thoughtful questions. I will start with the mindfulness question because it is the quickest one to deal with from my perspective. Colleagues in the National Education Psychological Service, NEPS, are doing a huge amount of work with schools on mindfulness and well-being. The Senator asked what happens in the examination setting. Our superintendents are teachers so they are used to dealing with young people and they are used to not just dealing with the mechanics of delivering the examinations but to also engaging with young people in that setting. If a student is having a difficulty on the day, we have experienced people on hand in the examination centre and available to them in school.

On the technology issue the Senator raised, we are using a huge amount of technology and it has really stood to us over the past two years when we were able to deliver calculated and accredited grades. We were able to do so because we had built up capacity in online marking. The use of the candidate self-service portal in recent years has been phenomenal and gives students immediate access to a lot of information, not only their results but subsequently the data about the marks they got. For this year we have almost all of our leaving certificate subjects marked online and students will have access to almost all of their leaving certificate scripts online after the results come out.