Aengus Ó Snodaigh (Dublin South Central, Sinn Fein)
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438. To ask the Minister for Education and Skills if his Department will engage with DEIS 1 schools in the Dublin 8 area to see the way in which the band 1 designation can be improved and that the schools most capable of dealing with the complex issues some children have can do so, rather than children being diverted to schools without the facilities and so on to help them. [28123/20]

Josepha Madigan (Dublin Rathdown, Fine Gael)
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DEIS is the main policy initiative of the Department of Education to address educational disadvantage at school level.

The Department is in the final stages of refinement of the new DEIS identification model, based on school enrolment data and the latest data available from Census 2016 using the HP Deprivation Index.

A detailed quality analysis of the data has been carried out by members of the DEIS Technical Group which contains representatives of the Department’s Statistics and Social Inclusion Units, the Inspectorate and the Educational Research Centre. The work of this group is at an advanced stage and a consultation process with education stakeholder representatives on the technical aspect of this model has commenced. It is envisaged that this will then provide the basis for development of a DEIS resource allocation system to match resources to identified need and will be applied on the same basis across the country.

The culmination of this work 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. It is not proposed to extend or to make any changes to the DEIS Programme until this work is complete.

Regardless of whether or not schools are in the DEIS programme, all schools receive allocations of additional special education teacher support, to provide extra teaching support to pupils who have additional learning needs.

DES Circular 007/2019 for primary schools and 008/2019 for post primary schools set out the details of the model for allocating special education teachers to schools.

The Special Education Teaching allocation provides a single unified allocation for special educational support teaching needs to each school, based on each school’s educational profile.

The Special Education Teacher allocation, allows schools to provide additional teaching support for all pupils who require such support in their schools and for schools to deploy resources based on each pupil’s individual learning needs.

It gives greater flexibility to schools as to how they can deploy their resources, to take account of the actual learning needs pupils have, as opposed to being guided by a particular diagnosis of disability, and schools are guided as to how they should make such allocation decisions.

The Department of Education and Skills has published guidelines for schools as to how they should utilise and deploy their resources under the new allocation model, which are available at

All schools are therefore resourced to provide additional teaching support for pupils who may require extra support based on the profiled needs of schools.