Mr. Donald Ewing:

As part of the eligibility criteria for the Irish exemption, there are two tracks. The first is that there should be evidence of a persistent difficulty and that reasonable learning supports have not helped. That often has to be evidenced in a school support plan. There is an issue in the fact that many schools do not have the current practice of regular implementation and review of school support plans. However, that longitudinal response to intervention approach is one part of eligibility criteria.

The second track is an "and" criterion. As well as having evidence of the difficulty and of supports not having helped, it is also necessary to have a particular test of reading, spelling or comprehension. Schools are asked to do one test of one thing on one day, and if that test lands at the tenth percentile or below, that ticks the second box to make a young person eligible.

The problem with that is that we should not be making big decisions about young people's education based on one test of one thing on one day. It is methodologically massively unsound. As Ms O'Rourke said in her opening statement, we do not know why the tenth percentile has been chosen. There is no methodological rationale for that. I suggest it is because we work in base ten and it is a nice round number which people can get their heads around.

With any estimation of truth, be it a poll result for a particular political party or a standardised test score, there are margins of error. We agree we should not make big decisions where a young person might get a score in the tenth percentile but on another day it could be much lower. If a young person gets a score at the 12th percentile, we make big decisions and we refuse to retest because we feel that is unfair, whereas in the same test on another day, the child could actually meet the eligibility criteria. It is a massively unsafe approach.