Brendan Smith (Cavan-Monaghan, Fianna Fail)
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64. To ask the Minister for Education and Skills his plans to include more schools, both primary and post-primary, in the DEIS programme; if so, the likely timescale for such developments; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [47475/19]

Joe McHugh (Donegal, Fine Gael)
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As the Deputy is aware, my Department has introduced an objective, statistics based model, for assessing which schools merit inclusion in the DEIS programme.

All schools at both Primary and Post Primary level are being assessed using this new methodology based on their enrolments from 2018/19 and the latest data available from Census 2016 under the HP Deprivation Index.  The accuracy of address data is vital to this process and an Eircode lookup function was added to the Primary and Post Primary Online Databases earlier this year to facilitate this.

Following a detailed analysis of the quality of the address data, my Department is now in the final stages of further data analysis on the new identification model to allow for the development of a resource allocation model to match resources to identified need.  The work is at an advanced stage and a consultation process with the relevant stakeholders will follow.

I am confident that the culmination of this analysis will facilitate the ultimate aim of matching resources to identified need and will allow us to target extra resources at those schools most in need.