Ms Aoife Rush:

To respond to the Deputy's initial question, when the NCCA is working on the senior cycle, we issue a request for expressions of interest from schools to engage. The first step is that we work with schools that express an interest in a particular subject area. Then what we do is take a random, stratified sample to work with. We would look at things like whether a school is in the DEIS programme, its location, size, student numbers and gender breakdown and we would choose schools from that random sample. In the first instance, we work with schools that have expressed an interest in being involved in a subject area.