Gary Gannon (Dublin Central, Social Democrats)
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151. To ask the Minister for Education and Skills if there was a difference between the number of CAO first preference offers in 2020 between candidates using 2020 predictive leaving certificate grades and those that completed their leaving certificate in other years in tabular form. [24575/20]

Simon Harris (Wicklow, Fine Gael)
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The CAO is a company established by Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) to process applications for undergraduate, and some postgraduate, courses on their behalf.  Decisions on admissions are made by the HEIs who then instruct the CAO to make offers to successful candidates. Therefore application and offer data is held by the CAO, not by my Department, and the figures requested by the Deputy cannot be provided.

The CAO publishes data on first preference offers each year. As can be seen in the table below, the proportion of applicants receiving a first preference offer is in line with previous years, and due to the additional places provided the number of applicants receiving a first preference offer for a Level 8 course is 6% higher than last year, and the number receiving a first preference offer for a Level 7/6 course is 5% higher than last year.