Thomas Byrne (Meath East, Fianna Fail)
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72. To ask the Minister for Education and Skills the reason data on junior certificate retention rates by school, junior certificate exam results aggregated to school level and or leaving certificate retention rates by school were not used to identify post-primary schools that had high levels of disadvantage for the DEIS identification process; and the further reason he is of the view it is an improvement to exclude information on actual education outcomes from the identification process in favour of purely using information on the socioeconomic context of a school, which is only moderately correlated with actual education outcomes. [24666/17]

Richard Bruton (Dublin Bay North, Fine Gael)
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As the Deputy will be aware, the publication in February last of DEIS Plan 2017 was preceded by a comprehensive DEIS Review process which included the work of a Technical Group to consider appropriate eligibility criteria to identify the level of need in schools and to develop an appropriate methodology for a new assessment framework.  

The Technical Group undertook an extensive body of work and research which is set out in the Report on the Review of DEIS which is available on my Department’s website at https://www.education.ie/en/Schools-Colleges/Services/DEIS-Delivering-Equality-of-Opportunity-in-Schools-/DEIS-Review-Report.pdf.   This work included a review of the methodologies used in 2005 and the options now available given developments in the availability of centrally held data.  It also took account of the   experience of the implementation of DEIS to date and through comprehensive stakeholder consultation.

The DEIS Review consultation process noted stakeholder concerns about the use of educational outcomes as a basis for extending DEIS supports to schools, or for reducing such supports.  In particular it was felt that outcomes achieved due directly to the input of specific additional resources and supports should not be used as a means to remove these supports from schools.  It was considered that this would give rise to a perception of penalising success and rewarding failure.

As the Deputy is aware, an identification process has been developed which uses CSO Small Area data as represented in the Haase Pratschke Index of Deprivation (HP Index) combined with DES Primary and Post Primary data supplied by schools. 

There is a strong focus in DEIS Plan 2017 on supporting schools to achieve improved outcomes, rather than using those outcomes to determine the level of supports they might receive.

 The use of the HP Index in the context of educational disadvantage is consistent with its use across a broad range of Government Departments, agencies and various public sector entities.  The index contains variables which provide a measure of the underlying risk of educational disadvantage and the exploratory analysis conducted by the Educational Research Centre shows that there is a moderate to strong correlation between scores on the HP index and poorer educational outcomes across the school spectrum, particularly in urban and post primary schools. 

It is important to note that as part of my announcement in February in launching DEIS Plan 2017, I made it clear that we would continue to conduct further analysis to examine other strong predictors of educational disadvantage in the context of resource allocation.  In view of this, as set out in both the Report on the Review of DEIS and DEIS Plan 2017, the Technical Group will continue its work, supplemented as necessary by additional research and data expertise. 

A key objective of DEIS Plan 2017 is to achieve a more dynamic and tailored process for the assessment of schools which will more closely match resources to identified need.