Mr. Seán Ó Foghlú:

Again, the Department did not engage Polymetrika; the Educational Research Centre, ERC, engaged it. I have information on the nature of the work that Polymetrika has undertaken for agencies under the aegis of the Department. I can outline that. Either Polymetrika or the person who is the owner of Polymetrika, Fernando Cartwright, was involved with the Irish education system in 2010. At that time we received information from the PISA 2009 survey on the achievement of 15-year-old students and there was an unexpected decline in that regard. The ERC, at our request, commissioned Statistics Canada, where that person was working, to examine all the Irish PISA data to establish why the unexpected declines had occurred. Two experts from Statistics Canada, including the named person, worked with the ERC to provide a full technical review of PISA at the request of the Department. Further work and research articles were written in that regard. In addition, the research that was undertaken established that a bias in the way the trend data were constructed had occurred.