Aengus Ó Snodaigh (Dublin South Central, Sinn Fein)
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243. To ask the Minister for Education and Skills the accommodation that has been made to ensure that students of the class of 2020 that never got to finish their courses, that received calculated grades in 2020, sat the leaving certificate in 2020 and are being expected to await the first round of CAO offers in September in 2021 to know their fate in relation to their preferred choice of university course thus forcing them to compete for limited places in specialist courses such as radiography or biomedical science with the leaving certificate class of 2021; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [28916/21]

Simon Harris (Wicklow, Fine Gael)
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Universities and Institutes of Technology are autonomous and determine their own procedures for admission. The CAO process applications for undergraduate, and some postgraduate, courses on their behalf.

Decisions on admissions are made by the higher education institutions who then instruct the CAO to make offers to successful candidates. Therefore neither I nor my Department have a function in relation to such matters and it is not within my remit to determine admissions criteria or direct HEIs to admit certain students.

It is my understanding that a total of 632 CAO offers have been made to students whose results in the 2020 written Leaving Certificate examinations brought them into consideration for a higher preference offer, based on their 2020 CAO application. These students will have the option to take up these offers for the 2021 academic year. While the offers have already been confirmed to students, they will be formally made as part of CAO Round A, which takes place in July.

Students who sat the 2020 written examinations but did not achieve the points needed for a higher preference offer had the option to apply for the 2021 academic year using their updated results. However any offers made to these students will be on the basis of the 2021 points requirements, and will be made as part of CAO Round One.

The CAO system is a system that works on the assumption that grades obtained in the Leaving Certificate by candidates determine their points. It is on this basis that the CAO system allocates places to applicants including those from different years. To ensure impartiality, the automatic CAO points systems have been created in a way that does not allow for different treatment to be applied to different sub-groups, or students with results from different years.