Ms Andrea Feeney:

There was a question about the ranking order model. The school estimates work was the most important information we had. It was not only the school estimate of the students' likely level of performance, had they sat the examination, but also their places in the classes, as indicated by the teacher by reference to the rank order. A commitment we gave to schools in advance of the process starting was that we would preserve that rank order.

We noted that schools were unable to standardise their results against each other. A person in one school would not know how the teachers in the school down the road might approach the marking process. We needed to have some mechanism for being able to standardise and, effectively, the standardisation was done by reference to the rank order. By providing a rank order, teachers were telling us how the student performed relative to the peers in class. It was an important piece of information.

The system allowed for outliers, such as if there was a high-performing student in a potentially lower-performing group of students. The system was capable of recognising that. If a strongly performing group of students were in a particular class, we had the junior cycle data within the model. While some changes were made later in the process in removing the school historical data, there was information left in the model that allowed us to scientifically and statistically approach the standardisation process.