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

I have not. The final point I would make is that the Department of Education and Skills has, for the first time, introduced an objective statistics-based model for deciding which schools merit inclusion in the DEIS programme in order that all stakeholders can have confidence that we are targeting extra resources at the schools that need them and have the highest concentrated levels of disadvantage. The Deputies should be welcoming that. I do not see why people have a problem with that. With effect from September this year, the schools included in DEIS will be those which have been identified as serving the pupil cohorts with the highest concentrations of disadvantage. The schools which have not been included are those which have not been identified as having those levels of concentrated disadvantage under the new identification model. Prior to any further adjustments to the allocation of DEIS supports, the identification process will be updated to include the most recent and current data available in terms of small area data derived from census 206, which is again something the Deputies should be pleased about. The update of the associated Haase-Pratschke index was recently published. The plan is to reassess all schools in terms of their identified levels of disadvantage. The timeline for that process of assessment is for it to be completed by the end of the first quarter of 2018. I would hope that in the aftermath of that, having determined which schools are at the most serious levels of disadvantage, those schools will be the first ones to be supported.

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