Norma Foley (Kerry, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Deputy. DEIS is the main policy initiative of my Department to tackle educational disadvantage at school level. Schools in the programme avail of a range of targeted supports aimed at tackling educational disadvantage, including additional classroom teaching posts, home-school community liaison co-ordinator posts, DEIS grant funding and access to the school completion programme.

On 9 March, I was pleased to announce the expansion of the DEIS programme. This will see the programme extended to an additional 310 schools. In addition, 37 existing DEIS schools are being reclassified and are eligible for increased supports. These schools were identified as having the highest levels of educational disadvantage. This now means that in the 2022-23 school year, there will be 1,194 schools in the DEIS programme, 960 of which are in primary and 234 in post-primary.

From next September, more than 240,000 students, or nearly one in four students, will be supported in the programme. This is the largest ever single investment in the programme, and it will extend DEIS status to schools that are serving the highest proportions of pupils at a risk of educational disadvantage.

From 2023, the Department will spend in the region of €180 million on the DEIS programme. This is an increase of €32 million. This announcement follows an extensive body of work by the DEIS technical group to develop the refined DEIS identification model to identify the concentrated level of disadvantage in schools. Schools were identified for inclusion in the programme through the refined DEIS identification model, which is an objective statistics-based model. The model was applied equally to all schools. The model uses address information that schools provide under their annual returns to the Department. These addresses were then combined with the Pobal HP deprivation index, which is a method of measuring the relative affluence or disadvantage of a particular geographical area. The HP index divides the country into approximately 18,500 small areas, with approximately 100 dwellings in each.

The refined DEIS identification model being applied to schools in 2022 builds on the objectivity and fairness of the 2017 version, but now captures a greater breadth of disadvantage and accounts for severity of disadvantage through the application of a weighted process. The DEIS identification model takes into consideration the significant educational disadvantage experienced by Traveller and Roma learners and by students who are residing in direct provision or students who are residing in emergency homeless accommodation. Schools were not required to apply for inclusion in the DEIS programme. The model has been fairly and equally applied to all schools. To ensure all schools are treated equally and fairly, those that have not been included in the programme at this time will have an opportunity to have the decision reviewed. The Department will provide further information in the coming days on this appeals process on its website.

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