THE examinations branch of the Department of Education has taken a fair amount of stick over the past year concerning missing art and woodwork projects.

However, students sitting exams this week have every reason to be confident in the system they operate. Organising and managing the certificate exams is a huge logistical operation, and the occasions when mistakes have occurred are few and far between.

With a permanent staff of just 75 people - and a similar number of casuals taken in on a temporary basis for the duration of the exams - the exams branch has to run exams in 4,800 centres around the country, arrange the printing of 12 million pages of exam questions and handle over a million exam scripts and papers. And all of this has to be done with the tightest security imaginable.

For the exams branch the exams started long ago. The first of the scripts began printing as far back as Christmas. Some of them are printed in Britain and some here - all under the highest security conditions - and the exams papers are stored in specially secured warehouses in Athlone, Co Westmeath, under lock and key.

Only a very limited number of people have access to them. Checking and proofreading the exam papers is a nightmare, particularly as so few people can have access to them, so the printing has to take place well in advance (see story below left).

All last week, staff at the exams branch have been checking the numbers sitting both exams in each of the 4,800 exam centres - for every subject and at each level. The relevant number of scripts - plus a few additional ones for safety - are then placed in envelopes which are sealed, labelled and placed in a strongbox for each exam centre.

All the exam scripts for each centre are labelled with the subject and date and the strongbox is locked and sealed. That seal can only be broken by the exam centre supervisor on the first day of the exams. Each supervisor must check that the strongbox is still sealed when she or he receives it.

Last weekend may have been a bank holiday for most people, but for the staff at the exams branch it was their hardest working few days of the year, as they prepared the boxes of exam scripts to be distributed around the country.

From early yesterday morning the lorries have been rolling out of Athlone carrying the strongboxes with a million exam scripts to 13 regional exam centres around the country.

Each regional centre has a senior departmental inspector and several officials on duty as well as security staff. These centres co ordinate the exam centres in their area and are prepared to despatch additional papers if anything goes wrong or send an inspector dashing out to a problem exam centre at short notice.

The strongboxes are stored there overnight and are collected from the centres by the exam supervisor for each centre today. Each exam centre - the vast majority are in schools - must provide a secure room where the strongbox can be locked overnight; if it cannot provide this, the box is taken to the local Garda station.

Already, last week, another 4,800 strongboxes have been sent to the regional centres. These contained the answer books which the students use for answering and, again, a separate envelope of stationery is packed for each subject in each centre. There are only 800 odd second level schools, but most schools would have several separate exam centres, each with its own supervisor.

Most public attention focuses on the June written exams, but in fact the Athlone exams branch has been in the full throes of examining since well before Easter. There have been Leaving Cert Irish and continental language orals, Junior Cert art assessment, music practicals, practicals in engineering and construction studies and Leaving Cert Applied assessments, among others. Roughly a quarter of a million oral exams are processed each year, and all the oral and other practical results have to be keyed into the computer and coordinated with the written exam results. In recent weeks staff at the exams branch were also keying in results of the home economics and music practical tests in the Junior Cert.

The number of people involved in running the exams is enormous. Apart from the 130 or so people in the exams branch, most of the departmental inspectors are also involved. There are 4,800 supervisors in the exam centres and another 4,800 assistants or gofers" assisting them. More than 5,000 teachers are employed as correctors.