Norma Foley (Kerry, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

The Department of Education has engaged significantly with the school management bodies and unions to outline the development of the DEIS identification model. In the coming days, further information will be made available on the Department’s website relating to the development and implementation of the DEIS identification model. This will provide a clear outline to schools on how the information provided by them on the student enrolment database was used in conjunction with the HP deprivation index data to identify the schools with the highest levels of educational disadvantage for inclusion in the DEIS programme. The identification process was applied equally to every school in the country. The HP deprivation index, as employed by the DEIS model, is also employed in a number of Departments, including the Departments of Justice, Health and Social Protection. The tool measures relative advantage or disadvantage. There are 18,500 small areas of approximately 100 dwellings, and the purpose is to identify not individual deprivation but pockets of deprivation, that is, what is called cumulative disadvantage. It has been acknowledged in both national and international studies that, where there is an accumulation of disadvantage in an area, that is an even more significant disadvantage to a student. It is for that purpose that we have this model in order that targeted interventions can take place where there is cumulative disadvantage. The data that were relied on are the same data, as the Deputy mentioned, from the primary online database, POD, and the post-primary online database, PPOD, identical for all school data, and they were combined with the HP deprivation index. The weightings the Deputy mentioned are in the POD------

See this speech in context