As leaving and Junior Certificate papers gently drop on to desks this morning, students may not be the only ones with beads of sweat dancing along their foreheads.

The 100 staff of the exam centre in Athlone, Co Westmeath, will be in a similar vexed condition, along with the 5,500 superintendents supervising the State examinations this year.

Such people are used to being seen as bit players in the annual drama played out at schools around the State every June. Media coverage rightly concentrates on the agonies of bleary-eyed students and their stressed parents, and not on the civil servants and teachers who crank the machinery into gear every summer.

But far from the 4,500 exam centres, an operation of massive scale has been under way for several months - an operation of such scale that £20 million is needed to keep it on the road this year.

Mr Martin Hanevy, principal officer of the exams branch, is the soft-spoken man at the centre of the action. As he walks around the wide corridors of the Department's Athlone centre one could be forgiven for thinking he heads a publishing empire. All around him employees are wheeling trolleys full of papers and stationery; in room after room there are piles of paper and expensive-looking computers and packaging machinery. Mr Hanevy makes his way past pallets which litter the floor, stacked high with answer books.

As he walks around the centre you have to remind yourself that at the end of this whole frenetic process are thousands of hopeful pupils pinning their hopes on a good exam performance.

Mr Hanevy tries hard not to let the sometimes hysterical mood which surrounds the exam process infect the work in Athlone. Speaking to him, one gets a sense of a man who has witnessed a lot of drama and hype over the years but has developed a fine sense of filtering out what is not important.

While students worry about things like what poet will come up on the English paper, Mr Hanevy and his staff have to worry about everyone finding out weeks before the exam takes place. In that regard they have been remarkably successful - there has not been a major security breach in living memory. A look at the security apparatus in Athlone helps explain why. Four strong rooms with thick metal doors and blunt "only authorised personnel" signs are the most obvious manifestations. Inside is the examination equivalent of gold bullion - the papers themselves.

They are in sealed packets each designated to a specific school. They are eventually placed in locked metal boxes which are taken under escort to the 4,500 examinations centres around the State. The night before the exam they are held in a Garda station or in secure accommodation at the schools.

Even with such a security blanket in place, human frailties can cause things to go wrong. For example, two years ago there was a near-meltdown in the system when a teacher in the south inadvertently gave out Leaving Certificate Irish paper 2 to students about to sit paper 1. As news and accompanying rumours spread, Mr Hanvey and his colleagues had to make a call: to postpone the Irish exam for everyone or let it continue? "We came face to face with the stark reality of having to think about a contingency for the 60,000 students taking that subject," he says.

But after a Department inspector visited the area, he discovered the students had seen little of the paper, and the exam took place as normal. In the subsequent marking there was no sign anyone had got a sneak preview.

"We had to balance up making the whole Leaving Cert cohort resit the exam against the risk that students in the school had seen the paper," Mr Hanevy says.

The contingency plan available to the exams branch in this type of case is another exam paper, prepared as a replacement for emergencies. Considering the scale of the operation, it is surprising the staff have never had to fall back upon this contingency. This is even more surprising when one reviews some statistics which give a flavour of the paper trail which passes through Athlone each year.

About 435,000 grades will be awarded in 31 different subjects.

122,000 packets will be sent out and returned to the Athlone centre.

1.5 million answer books will be used by students and sent back to Athlone.

Amid this morass of paper the system tries to be fair and eliminate error, Mr Hanevy says. He claims the exams branch has between a 1 and 2 per cent margin of error across its operation. Papers, oral cassettes and some practical work have gone missing over the years, but Mr Hanevy is satisfied the system and has responded well to the increasing complexity of the process.

While the operation at Athlone - by its very nature - has to be clinical and mechanical, Mr Hanevy has strong views on how the exam process can be refined to the benefit of its users - the students. "In this country I think we are over-reliant on this idea of a terminal exam which creates a cauldron for the student." What way could it be tweaked to take some of the heat off? "We need to look at models of internal assessment and need to distinguish between the Junior and Leaving Cert exams and the purpose of each of them.

"The Junior Cert informs teachers of how a pupil is performing midway through second level, so there is no reason why teachers could not be involved in assessing where students are at that stage." Although some of the teacher unions are against such internal assessment, Mr Hanevy says it takes place at third level and no one seems to object.