Josepha Madigan (Dublin Rathdown, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I am delighted to see the new Seanad. This is my first time here, either as a senior Minister or as Minister of State. Hats off to the people who refurbished it. It is wonderful to see the work, particularly the ceiling and the beautiful lights. I have been looking around at the surroundings.

DEIS is under the remit of the Minister for Education, Deputy Foley, but I am happy to take this matter today.It is wonderful to see the work, especially the ceiling, the beautiful lights and everything else. It is lovely. I have been looking around a little bit at the surroundings.

I will respond to the Senator's questions on DEIS, which is under the remit of the Minister for Education, Deputy Foley, but I am happy to take this matter today.

DEIS is the main policy initiative of the Department of Education to tackle educational disadvantage at school level. The DEIS plan sets out the vision for interventions in the critical area of educational disadvantage policy and is based on the findings of an extensive review of the DEIS programme, which involved consultations with all relevant stakeholders.

As the Senator will be aware, the programme for Government commits to completing "the new DEIS identification model, ensuring the extension of DEIS status to schools that are identified as being suitable". A key part of the DEIS plan was the introduction of a new DEIS identification process based on an objective, statistics-based model to determine which schools merit inclusion in the programme. The DEIS plan acknowledged that further work was required to refine the model. For this reason, as part of the further extension of the DEIS programme to more schools, an extensive body of work has been undertaken to refine this model, based on the latest school enrolment data and data available from census 2016 under the HP deprivation index. Senator Ardagh noted the key data sources - the primary online database and the post-primary online database and also the CSO data for the national census of population - taken into account when considering DEIS status.

A detailed quality analysis of the data has been carried out by members of the DEIS technical group, which includes representatives of the Department's statistics and social inclusion units, the inspectorate and the Educational Research Centre. As Senator Ardagh correctly indicated, the Department has commenced a consultation process with education partners on the refinement of the model. I understand work is now ongoing on final elements of the model. It is envisaged that this will provide the basis for the development and application of a refined DEIS resource allocation model to ultimately match resources to identified need.

All schools will be considered for inclusion under the refined DEIS model. I note the Senator mentioned some schools in her area that have not been included. Until this work is complete, it is my understanding that it is not intended to extend the DEIS programme to any further schools. I reassure the Senator that the Department is working to ensure that those most in need of support can be provided with the necessary resources to help them fulfil their potential in education.

Senator Ardagh will be aware that additional resources have been made available to DEIS schools in order to address educational disadvantage, such as an increase in the budget of the school completion programme, the expanded summer programme, which increased from €20 million to €40 million this year, and the reduction in the pupil-teacher ratio for DEIS band 1 schools. This year, the Department will spend in the region of €150 million on the DEIS programme and we will seek to increase investment in this area and continue exploration of new approaches to support students at risk of educational disadvantage. I thank Senator Ardagh for raising this matter.