Dáil debates

Tuesday, 22 March 2022

Saincheisteanna Tráthúla - Topical Issue Debate

Education Schemes

9:40 pm

Photo of Éamon Ó CuívÉamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail)
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I would like to thank the Minister for coming this evening to reply. Some schools were disappointed and surprised that they were not included in the delivering equality of opportunity in schools, DEIS, programme. I understand that it is a process whereby the Department, as far as it has access to data, has used objective data to try to determine which schools should be part of the scheme. My understanding is that the primary online database, POD, information given is name, address, Eircode postcode, PPSN, pupil ID number, gender, nationality, whether the mother tongue is English or Irish, ethnic or cultural background - presumably that means Roma, Traveller, etc. - and religion. The other source of data is the Pobal HP deprivation index for small area data. My understanding is that data is into the mixer. It is a little bit of one and a little bit of the other. Which of those details is the Department using? Clearly, as the Minister has said previously, it uses the small area data. What weighting is given to each index? For example, the Department knows where the children live because it has their Eircode postcodes and knows their nationality. These are the kinds of questions that I think need to be clarified. What happens if one parent is Irish and one is non-Irish? Does it depend on where the child was born? What happens if both parents are naturalised Irish and a child was born here, etc.? Because the information the Department has is fairly scant, how does it work this out? Schools authorities will look at this and will say:

Hang on the second. Was the information we gave accurate, and did it reflect all of the possibilities? We never realised that such a major decision would be made on our application to the scheme based on this data.

Another issue that arises relates to ethnic or cultural background. Let us take it that that means Roma and Traveller ethnicities. The Minister specifically mentions, in fairness to her, educational disadvantage experienced by Traveller and Roma learners. Here again we might challenge. While I do know how we will deal it, I want to highlight it here this evening. Many people from Traveller or Roma background might not identify as such for various reasons. There were some interesting examples of that on the television on “Claire Byrne Live” last night. People said that they hid their identity for fear that it would be a disadvantage to them. I recall a Traveller parent who came to me. She was really suspicious when she was enrolling her child as to why the school wanted to know whether the parent was a Traveller because she felt that if she said, “Yes”, it might be a reason that the school would use - I knew the school would not have used it, but she did not know that - to not accept the pupil in the school.

I know of two schools in particular that seem to have an odd situation. One is a school that everyone would say is very mixed in terms of nationality and the background of children. It is in an area that is certainly not that affluent. It has missed out on the scheme or the second time whereas, in the same area, other schools that would seem more advantaged have been accepted into the scheme, although I do not begrudge that. The second school is an island school. One school on the island was in and the other school on the same island was out. This seems unusual. Again, if we knew the matrix in detail at least people would have some understanding of how the Department arrived at its answer.

Photo of Norma FoleyNorma Foley (Kerry, Fianna Fail)
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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.

Photo of Éamon Ó CuívÉamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail)
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I thank the Minister for the reply, but to certain extent it reminded me of Tim Figgerty from long ago, although the Minister is probably too young to have ever heard of him. He was a mythical figure who used to get the figs into the Fig Rolls. He went missing and the story that a certain biscuit manufacturer had was that nobody would ever find out how to get the figs into the Fig Rolls and that they were in serious trouble. I still have not found out how to get the figs into Fig Rolls.

The Minister told me there is a weighted process. I asked specifically about the actual algorithms and weightings. Is it that there are, say, ten marks for certain Eircode postcodes and the small area statistics, 20 marks for Traveller pupils, five marks for Roma pupils or what is it? What are all the weightings and figures and how is the calculation carried out? It is only fair, in the interests of transparency, that the Department would give detail of the mathematical formula it used in order that people making appeals will know how they failed to get into the scheme and what information carries the most weight. As I said, a school might find out, for example, that it had understated the number of Roma or Traveller students. The Department has, obviously, used nationality in regard to people's mother tongue and so on. Will the Minister publish the mathematical formula, or the algorithm as it is now called? Will she give a breakdown of the assessment for each school, showing exactly how the Department arrived at the conclusion for each school that failed to get in?

9:50 pm

Photo of Norma FoleyNorma Foley (Kerry, Fianna Fail)
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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------

Photo of Seán Ó FearghaílSeán Ó Fearghaíl (Kildare South, Ceann Comhairle)
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I thank the Minister but she is out of time.