Jan O'Sullivan (Limerick City, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I thank Deputy Brendan Ryan. Given the current economic climate and the target to reduce public expenditure, prioritising and maintaining resources for children at risk of educational disadvantage is a significant challenge. As the Deputy stated, even in difficult times, both under my predecessor and in the recent budget, we protected the DEIS budget. The current focus of my Department is on maintaining existing supports for schools catering for the most concentrated levels of educational disadvantage. This means that there is no capacity for additionality to the DEIS programme.

The aim of DEIS is to ensure that the educational needs of children and young people from disadvantaged communities are prioritised and effectively addressed. An extensive identification process was conducted by the Educational Research Centre on behalf of the Department in 2005 - as the Deputy stated, a full ten years ago - to select the schools for inclusion in the DEIS programme on the basis of their relative level of disadvantage, with priority being given to the most concentrated levels of disadvantage. In the primary sector, the identification process was based on a survey carried out in May 2005, from which a response rate of more than 97% was achieved. In the case of second-level schools, the Department supplied the Educational Research Centre with centrally-held data from the post-primary pupils and State Examinations Commission databases.

The DEIS programme is the subject of ongoing evaluation by the Educational Research Centre and the inspectorate of my Department. The focus of this research is to ensure the successful implementation of DEIS and that the best possible approaches to measuring progress and outcomes at both local and national level are being used.

As Deputy Brendan Ryan stated, the research to date demonstrates encouraging results. Literacy and numeracy rates in primary schools are improving steadily, second level attainment levels are also improving and attendance, participation and retention levels are increasing. Most importantly, learning from interventions in school planning, teacher education and parental engagement which have been developed in the DEIS programme is now being used in the wider school system to improve teaching and learning outcomes in all schools. However, there remains a gap between the overall achievements of children in DEIS schools and the national average which means that supports for schools catering for the most concentrated levels of educational disadvantage must be maintained.

An overall report on the learning from DEIS is currently being prepared by the Economic and Social Research Institute. This report will incorporate information on the various inputs, processes and educational outcomes contained in the findings from the DEIS research and evaluations conducted by the Educational Research Centre and the Department's inspectorate to date. It will also review other Irish and international related research on educational disadvantage. The report will assess the main findings of the evaluations and provide advice to inform future policy direction on educational disadvantage, including DEIS. This report is currently being finalised and I expect to receive it shortly.

Accordingly, for the present, my focus and that of my Department is on taking the learning from DEIS and applying it to future policy making. This will ensure that future policy direction to tackle educational disadvantage will be evidence-based and grounded in the solid body of experience provided by the DEIS programme.

I expect the report to which I referred in the next few weeks. As the Deputy stated, we have not really been able to expand. Despite the fact that the programme is in existence for ten years, there has not been expansion. This will give us an opportunity to look at the success of DEIS and whether there should be other areas in DEIS. There is quite a lot of evidence, including the retention figures issued last week, on the success of DEIS, but it is time to re-evaluate it and to ensure that we do anything that needs to be done to change it for the better.

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