Eamon Ryan (Dublin Bay South, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

First, the most important people in this are the students. The Deputy is right that the young people in this year's leaving certificate class have had a year unlike any other. They have suffered probably more than most and as much as anybody else, other than those who went through illness or lost their lives. They have suffered most in terms of the quality of their lives at this critical time. In my experience, anyone making decisions in this entire process had the interests of the students at heart, first and foremost. That will continue to be the case. Included in that, following a coding error in the system, we will ensure there is no student who is unable to avail of a course he or she should have been able to access had that small change in code and those four characters being different in a 50,000 line code. We must ensure those students do not lose out. We are committed to doing that in every way possible.

Nobody was kept in the dark on this. The error only became apparent when the person who had been involved in doing the coding saw a slight variation in running the model again when working on the applied leaving certificate results. The person decided to check, at the person's own instigation, and found out what had happened. The person is eminently qualified. The person worked previously with Statistics Canada, the Canadian statistics agency, and also had specific expertise with regard to the Irish academic system due to work the person had done here in assessing our programme for international student assessment, PISA, results and had published on the very area on which the person was working. The person was eminently qualified. At a time when every country is considering these calculated grade systems, it was difficult to find people with such international expertise and knowledge of the Irish system.

On seeing the variation that occurred when the person ran the model for the applied leaving certificate, the person contacted the Department of Education and Skills late last Tuesday week. The Minister, Deputy Foley, and the Department were only informed on Wednesday morning that there was a difficulty, but it was not clear exactly what it was. The CAO ran its second round of offers on that day because it was not clear whether it was going to have an effect on the CAO process. The Department, correctly, started to address the issue. It employed a firm of American international consultants with expertise - it is the company that runs the SAT system in the US - as an independent, outside consultancy to go through the 50,000 lines of coding to ensure there were no other errors and to check what were the consequences of that code error. That work is due to be completed in the next day or two. Once it is confirmed to the Department, the model will be run again and the CAO will be immediately informed whether there are any upgrades, so it will be able to ensure that those students are not disadvantaged and are able to get the courses they should have received.

The Department informed my party and myself of the details on Friday. At that stage, because it was a complex issue to look into, there was only still an initial sense of where the difficulty might be. I was fully briefed on Monday in advance of a leaders' meeting where we discussed it at length. It is not a matter of keeping anyone in the dark at any stage. The Deputy can imagine if, at the early stage in this process, someone had gone out without full knowledge of what the consequences would be to all the thousands of students who did the leaving certificate. That would have created real anguish and uncertainty. It was only yesterday that the scale of the issue and the numbers were clear. A press conference was planned for 4 p.m. yesterday in advance of it being raised in the Dáil. There was no intention to keep anyone in the dark. There was an intention to try to get this right so that the risk or anguish to students would be minimised. I think that was the right approach.

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