Ms Bernie McNally:

I thank the Deputy for his question and for acknowledging the importance of DEIS around the country. I will focus on DEIS in a minute. As the Deputy will be aware, there are children with disadvantage in schools that do not have DEIS status. A number of services and supports are put into them, things like reducing the average class size to 23 over a number of budgets, 2,000 extra English-as-an-additional-language teachers going out into the system, DEIS and non-DEIS. A number of supports are being put into place in every school. As regards DEIS, 1,200 schools have DEIS status. One child in four is in a DEIS school.

The Deputy referred to instances that happen in local communities where some schools are in and some schools are out. We know that causes massive frustration and people question why this might happen. The Deputy will understand when there is a precious resource like this, we must have a system to do this objectively and as fairly as possible. The Deputy knows the background - we use the Pobal HP index which has a formula for calculating it. It looks at the 19,000 special small areas. It uses census data. It looks at the profession, if any, in the family and the number of people in the family. It looks at all of these factors and then shows us where there is concentrated disadvantage. We then layer on top of that Traveller, Roma, homeless and international protection and it identifies for us which schools should have DEIS status and which do not. On occasion, some schools lose out even though they may feel they have the identical profile to the school next door.

All we know is that the system - we have to have a system - is saying that there is a differentiation even though it might not be huge. That is the model. Nothing that any of us does is perfect. We continue to look to see how we can improve it. The OECD is working with us at the moment to see if there is a better identification model and how we might improve upon this. We are not the only Department that relies on the HP index. The Departments of Social Protection, Health and others also use it.