Much of the frustration of students and families is about the lack of transparency and the fact that they have been kept in the dark for a week, much as the Minister disputes that. As I said, the Opposition and the Cabinet were kept in the dark as well. The Minister still has not told us why he did not insist this issue be discussed at Cabinet and that his Cabinet colleagues knew. The other groups kept in the dark were the third level institutions and the Higher Education Authority, HEA. At the start of his answer to my supplementary question earlier, the Minister said the Minister with responsibility for higher education, Deputy Harris, and the Minister for Education and Skills, Deputy Foley, were working on actually sorting out this issue. If the Minister, Deputy Harris, knew on Friday and was sorting it out, then why did the HEA not find out until yesterday?

There was a detailed discussion on Monday night between the three different parties. It was agreed we would ask the Ministers, Deputies Harris and Foley, to continue to work on getting the exact details and all of the information, for the same reason I said here-----

How could they do that without the HEA?

On what basis would they go to the HEA and say they did not know the numbers and they did not know the exact consequences? It was appropriate to get those details and other arrangements correct.

It is very much involved now. It was informed in time so it has done a slightly revised third round offer for a variety of reasons it is best placed to make. It will make a further fourth offer next week, towards the end of the week. That is my expectation. From the best advice on how this can all be sorted out, it was far better to get that right and to get the pieces in place so we can adjust and ensure every student gets the third level they should have got and that is what will happen.

Following on from the mess yesterday and where we are coming from with calculated grades, the Government set up a calculated grades office in the Department of Education and Skills. Second, it set up the national standardisation group. Third, it set up the independent steering committee to oversee the implementation. Fourth, on top of those, the independent expert Dr. Janet Brown was appointed as an external reviewer. As such there were four layers in order to do the calculated grades. Then on 24 August all of that work changed suddenly. This was because the assistant secretary in the Department sent out a memo and changed the modelling. How in the name of God did these four layers not catch on that there was something wrong here?

I have a second question. We said this at the time but was 24 August not too late in the day to be changing the model which all 61,000 students in Ireland were depending on?

My understanding of why it was not seen is that the predicted results were very close to what was expected. There was a variance from historic patterns by, I think, 4%. All the analysis done by all the different tiers of State expertise and officials mentioned by the Deputy came to the conclusion that that was roughly what we expected. There was no other variation that in any way indicated that this coding error had been made whereby the bottom two of the junior certificate results were counted rather than the top next two. It was only when the person responsible for that ran the applied leaving certificate results that there was a variation he could not quite understand. He then looked through the 50,000 lines of code – he had certain expertise having written much of it – to find out what it was and he reported it back. The variation was not categorised in any one area, in any one school or in any one subject. It did not lead to a significant change in what the results would otherwise have been. It is still appropriate, to my mind, to adjust this to be absolutely correct and accurate in terms of how our leaving certificate is adjudged.

Minister, I ask you to co-operate.

Apologies for that.

I am going through the leader of each group first. Deputy Whitmore has one minute and there is one minute for the reply.