Ciarán Cannon (Galway East, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I am taking this debate on behalf of my colleague, the Minister for Education and Skills, Deputy Bruton. If he could be here, he would be. As the Deputies are aware, delivering equality of opportunity in schools, DEIS, is the main policy initiative of the Department of Education and Skills to address educational disadvantage at school level. No new schools had been admitted to DEIS since 2009. A new five-year plan was published in February 2017 and sets out, as a series of actions, the details of an updated DEIS school support programme which builds on existing supports available to schools in a way that sets out initiatives to ensure that stated targets are reached. A key objective of DEIS plan 2017 is the development of a more robust and responsive framework for assessing individual schools.

The new DEIS identification process uses data, including small area population statistics, SAPS, from the Central Statistics Office 2012, as represented in the Pobal small area HP deprivation index - Haase and Pratschke 2012, and centrally held Department of Education and Skills pupil data from the primary online database, POD, and the post-primary online database, P-POD. This approach removes the administrative burden on schools to provide socioeconomic data relating to its pupil cohort and ensures consistency and uniformity in the assessment process of schools across both the primary and post-primary system. The HP deprivation index, assesses demographic growth, dependency ratios, education levels, single parent rate, overcrowding, social class, occupation and unemployment rates. That data is combined with pupil data, anonymised and aggregated to provide information on the relative level of concentrated disadvantage in the pupil cohort of individual schools.

This system is also very responsive to changes in school demographics, which was strongly called for by stakeholders, in that this new identification methodology can be updated on an annual basis from the school annual census returns, and every five years following the CSO national census of population. The initial application of the model assessed all schools and found that most schools have pupils from disadvantaged areas but that the concentration of disadvantage varied.

The model also identified a number of schools not currently within DEIS, with a very high level concentration of disadvantage. Based on this information, and as a first step in the application of the new identification process, 79 additional schools were brought into the programme and a further 30 schools were identified for increased levels of support. These schools began to receive DEIS supports from September this year. In future years it is intended to extend the DEIS scheme further. This would involve admitting schools which have lower concentrations of disadvantage than this first group. It was in the context of a possible extension of the DEIS scheme at lower concentrations of disadvantage that the number of new schools and the cost that would be involved was estimated. This was the context in which the figure of 257 schools arose. There has been no question of excluding schools.

The first commitment which has been made is to reassess all schools in terms of their identified level of disadvantage, taking into account the updated census data combined with updated school data. The timeline is for this process to be completed by the end of the first quarter of 2018. This will allow new pupils and the changes in the profile of small areas between 2011 and 2016 to be taken into account in measuring the profile of schools. New schools at the high threshold of disadvantage may be identified in this process, and it is intended to bring any such additional schools identified into the scheme at the earliest possible opportunity subject to available resources. It remains the ambition to extend the scheme in future years to support schools and students where there is an identified need.

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