Mr. Seán Ó Foghlú:

A flag is up. We understand that some of those arise out of a change in circumstances and we are getting a report from the City of Dublin Vocational Education Committee to get behind the reasons for successful appeals. That is very important information.

Also, this is in the context of the comparative position on successful applications so far being lower than it would have been for all applications generally. We cannot be definitive about this until we have completed all of the applications. What we have now, effectively, is a single system being applied for new applications. Whether there can be absolute standardised practices in assessments within a single institution such as the City of Dublin Vocational Education Committee is always open to question, but it is a standardised approach compared with 66 approaches which were aimed to be consistent but where the possibility for inconsistency may have been greater given 66 different bodies had responsibility. The appeals issue combined with the rate of success issue is something we are looking at but we will not know if the rate of success is an issue until all the applications have been worked through because we cannot rely on partial information from a year.