Mr. Dalton Tattan:

I will start and then will let Dr. Hislop respond. There were three errors.

There was a further issue. The Educational Testing Services characterised the fourth as an issue rather than an error but it was something that was at slight variance with what was described but did not have any impact on students. It was something that we sought to clarify with them. On the three errors, obviously it was shocking. It was certainly shocking to those of us involved to find that out at that point in time.

All of the errors occurred in the small section of code. That is not in any way to reduce or excuse them or not talk about the impact because the impact, for the students involved, was significant. We did everything we could to resolve that for the students and in as timely a fashion as possible. They all related to one small section of code. It was described to me as a kind of family of coding and was all around how the junior cycle data was used. It was a particularly complex piece of code. Polymetrika is a company that we have used to do the coding for us. It worked extensively and intensively over a very short period of time to do that because other iterations of the standardisation models had looked at other ways to do this. It had looked at using a number of junior cycle subjects, using English, Irish, Maths and the one best result, and eventually it was brought to English, Irish, Maths and the best two excluding civic, social and political education or CSPE. It proved a very complex piece of code to the point where, at one stage, we thought it may not be possible to fully enact that and give it effect but ultimately it was possible. To be fair, Polymetrika spotted the first error. We would not, I do not think, have spotted the other errors only for them coming to light and immediately alerting us when it was discovered that there was an anomaly.

On the money issue, €71,000 was the initial cost. It was always envisaged that once we moved into implementation that there were going to be further costs involved. To my knowledge, the current amount invoiced to date is about €193,000 in total. I shall now pass over to Dr. Hislop, if that is okay.