Mr. Andrew Brownlee:

There is full confidence that the apprentices we produce and who graduate have all the requisite skills to be very successful tradespeople. There is lots of evidence that they are valued not just in Ireland, but internationally. The issue of leaked assessments is probably our number one concern and priority at the moment. As I said earlier, the plan in the medium term or as quickly as we can make it happen is to introduce assessment banks so that you will never be able to predict what questions are coming up in your practical or theory exams at phases 2, 4 and 6. That is where we are moving to but we cannot magic it into existence overnight. It needs to integrate with all of the IT systems in the ETBs and TUs. That is the medium-term approach. In the interim, our legal services partners are helping us try to identify how this can happen, how people can leak papers, how they can be made available on openly accessible websites and how people giving grinds can have some type of knowledge of the questions that are coming up. Those are the types of concerns we have. Our partners are trying to give us that accountability. The encouraging news is that the attention that has been brought to the issue probably means that anyone who was involved will now be very aware that this is in the spotlight. We cannot find any kind of relevant information live on the Internet or the web or whatever it is called these days. We are also doing that. We are also working to validate the 49 different skills check-ins across apprenticeships to get further confidence. Apprenticeship is not just about one exam on one day; it is about checking in across a four-year period and making sure that people come out with all the skills they need to do their jobs.