Richard Bruton (Dublin North Central, Fine Gael)
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Question 548: To ask the Minister for Education and Science the indicators she uses to judge progress against poverty in education and the way in which they have progressed in the past five years. [20397/06]

Mary Hanafin (Dún Laoghaire, Fianna Fail)
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A key focus of the Government's education policy is to prioritise investment in favour of those most at risk and to optimise access, participation and outcomes at every level of the system for disadvantaged groups.

The wide variety of measures in place for tackling educational disadvantage and social exclusion reflect these concerns. These measures range from pre-school interventions, supports for tackling children's literacy problems, reduced pupil teacher ratios, increased capitation grants, measures to tackle early school leaving and strengthen ties between the school, the family and the community. In addition, there are interventions in support of youth and in providing "second chance education" for young people and adults.

The Department of Education and Science's approach to addressing educational disadvantage and social exclusion is set in the context of the Programme for Government, the National Action Plans against Poverty and Social Exclusion, and social partnership agreements.

Effective monitoring, evaluation systems and target-setting were identified as key elements of the strategy under the review of the National Anti-Poverty Strategy (NAPS) in 2002. The development and use of targets and indicators has been a feature of the National Action Plans against Poverty and Social Exclusion (NAPs/incl) since their inception in 2001. In the area of education, key targets and their related indicators have been developed around literacy attainment, both among children and the adult population, retention of students within the education system, participation by Travellers, and access to further and higher education by those from disadvantaged backgrounds, mature students, other nationals and those with disabilities.

Further work on the development of education targets and indicators is continuing in the context of the National Action Plan against Poverty and Social Exclusion (NAP/inclusion) 2006-08. This work will also take account of developments under the social and equality statistics framework at national level and developments at EU level such as the Laeken Indicators and the indicators will be in line with international statistical concepts and facilitate international benchmarking.

DEIS (Delivering Equality of Opportunity in Schools), the action plan for educational inclusion, focuses on addressing the educational needs of children and young people from disadvantaged communities, from pre-school through second-level education (3 to 18 years). The action plan provides for a standardised system for identifying levels of disadvantage and a new integrated School Support Programme (SSP). The School Support Programme will bring together, and build upon, a number of existing interventions in schools with a concentrated level of disadvantage.

Under the standardised system for identifying levels of disadvantage, socio-economic variables were identified that collectively best predict achievement and these variables were then used to identify primary schools for participation in the new School Support Programme. These variables included: unemployment, local authority accommodation, lone parenthood, membership of the Traveller community, large families and pupils eligible for free books.