Thomas Pringle (Donegal, Independent)
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394. To ask the Minister for Education and Skills the criteria used in the decision to award a school with DEIS status; if changes have been made to the criteria from previous years; if not, if changes to the criteria are imminent for the forthcoming list; when the list will be updated; and if she will make a statement on the matter. [23120/21]

Norma Foley (Kerry, Fianna Fail)
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DEIS was first introduced in 2006 and the identification of schools for inclusion was based on two different processes at primary and post primary. At primary level, there was a survey of school principals which relied largely on subjective assessment using socio-economic variables. At post primary level a combination of data from the Departments pupil database including school level retention rates together with exam achievement data and exam fee waiver data, which indicated that students had medical cards, was used.

Following the DEIS Review process, and informed by consultation with education partners, my Department introduced an objective statistics based model for identifying schools for inclusion in the DEIS programme. The key data sources for the new model are the latest available school enrolment data from the POD and PPOD systems and the latest data available from Census 2016 under the HP Deprivation Index. The HP Deprivation Index is increasingly used by Government Departments and Agencies to more effectively allocate resources in the context of socio-economic deprivation.

Following the application of this model in 2017, a further 79 schools were included in the DEIS programme and 30 schools were upgraded from Band 2 to Band 1 status. As proposed in the DEIS plan additional work on refinement of the model has taken place in the interim. An extensive body of work has been undertaken in terms of the refinement of this model and a detailed analysis of the data has been carried out by members of the DEIS Technical Group. This group contains representatives of the Department’s Statistics and Social Inclusion Units, the Inspectorate and the Educational Research Centre. My Department has commenced a consultation process with education stakeholder representatives on the technical aspects and implementation of the model, and work is now ongoing on final elements of the model.

I am confident that 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 envisaged that this will then provide the basis for development of a DEIS resource allocation system to match resources to identified need.

Until this work is complete, it is not intended to extend the DEIS programme to any further schools.