James O'Connor (Cork East, Fianna Fail)
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440. To ask the Minister for Employment Affairs and Social Protection if the funding for the school meals programme in a school (details supplied) can be increased to reflect the number of students currently attending the school. [47640/21]

Heather Humphreys (Cavan-Monaghan, Fine Gael)
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The school meals programme provides funding towards the provision of food to some 1,506 schools and organisations benefiting 230,000 children. The objective of the programme is to provide regular, nutritious food to children who are unable, due to lack of good quality food, to take full advantage of the education provided to them. The programme is an important component of policies to encourage school attendance and extra educational achievement.

A budget of €65.1 million has been provided for the scheme in 2021.

The programme provides funding towards food services for disadvantaged school children through two schemes: the urban school meals scheme and the school meals (local projects) scheme. The Urban School Meals Scheme for primary schools is operated and administered by local authorities and is part-financed by my Department.

In recent years, entry to the School Meals Scheme has been confined to DEIS schools in addition to schools identified as having levels of concentrated disadvantage that would benefit from access to the School Meals Programme.

Prior to the introduction of DEIS in 2005, all schools and organisations that were part of one of a number of Department of Education and Skills’ initiatives for disadvantaged schools were eligible to participate in the programme, which included Breaking the Cycle, Giving Children an Even Break, the Disadvantaged Area Scheme, Home School Community Liaison and the School Completion Programme. These schools and organisations have continued to remain in the scheme since the introduction of DEIS in 2005 but their level of funding has been capped at the same rate year on that year to allow for the concentration of the scheme on DEIS schools.

The Department of Education 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 officials from their Department 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.

The school referred to by the Deputy was one of 175 non-DEIS schools that were identified by the Department of Education as requiring additional supports and were invited to apply for a breakfast club following the publication of the DEIS Action Plan 2017. They have operated a breakfast club since the 2017/2018 academic year. As this is a non-DEIS school, the level of funding provided is capped. Schools are advised of their allocation at the beginning of the academic year and are asked to manage their expenditure for the year ahead accordingly.

I intend to commission an independent evaluation of the school meals programme to inform future policy decisions in relation to the scheme. Current Departmental policy in relation to non-DEIS schools will be examined as part of this evaluation.

I trust this clarifies the matter for the Deputy.