Mr. Ian McKenna:

The North operates the UCAS system. It is precisely the same principle as throughout the United Kingdom. Students there will have provisional offers in their back pocket and await their results, whereas in our case, students wait for their results first and then get their offers from the universities. Within the UCAS system, students identify as part of the process that they want to study, say, architecture, arts or business studies and then identify the institutions they wish to go to. Based on the A-levels they take, with some prediction from the teachers, the institutions make an assessment and then will make a conditional offer. The students will have that before the results are published and, therefore, the final part of the equation relates to what results they actually get versus their predicted results, and if they meet the criteria, they will get a place at a UK university.