Ms Jackie Harrington:

The school meals programme has always been open to schools under schemes of disadvantage as determined by the Department of Education and Skills, including, for example, Giving Children an Even Break and other schemes that are no longer in place. Once a school entered a scheme it was not the Department's practice to remove it. There are some schools in the current scheme that came in under disadvantage schemes that were in place in the past. The current identification for disadvantage is DEIS. This is our focus in terms of bringing in new schools. This determination is carried out by analysis undertaken within the Department of Education and Skills, as opposed to the Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection. Currently, there are approximately 900 DEIS schools, of which 853, or 95%, are in the schools meal programme. In the past two weeks, we have written to the remaining 48. We would have written to many of these schools in the past because we periodically write to DEIS schools to encourage those who are not participating tend to be rural as opposed to urban DEIS schools. We have written to them again.

The increased funding has allowed us to improve the supports to DEIS such that we now offer breakfast and lunch to the majority of children in DEIS schools. On the non-DEIS schools that we are bringing in, we have been working with the Department of Education and Skills to identify schools that have some level of disadvantaged but probably not to the level required under DEIS. We wrote to approximately 170 of those schools last year, 140 of which opted into the scheme. In regard to those that did not opt-in last year, we have written to them again this year inviting them to come into the scheme. At this point, we have written to about 60 schools outside of DEIS, inviting them to join the scheme from this September. These schools were identified in consultation between the Departments of Employment Affairs and Social Protection and Education and Skills.