Ms Andrea Feeney:

I will deal with those questions in reverse order. No, it would not be appropriate for us to comment on those decisions in relation to continuity, what is happening at senior cycle, and recent decisions in relation to the timing of papers.

When my colleague and I refer to "malfunctioning", we are speaking in the context of how the exam question was expected to perform. Again, we are looking at the performance of students, the finalisation, and the marking scheme being predicated on how students responded and reacted to that question. We are not seeing errors in those questions but maybe in answering certain questions, the performance of candidates was weaker than we might have expected, and in other questions, the performance might have been stronger than expected. That is part of the normal standard-setting process we engage in.

I will ask my colleague Ms Sheridan to address the question on the literature and the priorities. That may, frustratingly for the committee, come back to a policy-related issue but we will do our best to answer that one.