Sorca Clarke (Longford-Westmeath, Sinn Fein)
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71. To ask the Minister for Education and Skills the number of primary schools with DEIS status by county in 2020, 2021 and to date in 2022, in tabular form. [58415/22]

Norma Foley (Kerry, Fianna Fail)
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DEIS – Delivering Equality of Opportunity in Schools is the main policy initiative of my Department to address concentrated educational disadvantage at school level. My Department provides a wide range of supports to all schools, DEIS and non-DEIS, to support the inclusion of all students and address barriers to students achieving their potential. Supplementing these universal supports, the DEIS programme provides a targeted and equitable way to address concentrated educational disadvantage that promotes equity within the system.

In March this year I was glad to be able to announce a major expansion of the DEIS programme. This means that, for the first time since 2017, the programme has been significantly expanded to an additional 322 schools, of which 284 were primary schools. The expansion in 2022 was the first expansion since 2017, hence there were no additional schools in DEIS in 2020 or 2021.

In the 2022/2023 school year there are currently 967 Primary schools in the DEIS Programme. For the 2021/2022 school year, 687 primary schools were included in the DEIS programme. The number of schools in the programme in 2020/2021 was two higher at 689. A copy of the detail of DEIS status on a county by county breakdown has been provided in tabular form as requested by the Deputy. The total number of schools listed in the DEIS programme takes into account school closures and amalgamations for each year.

Schools added to the programme earlier this year were identified for inclusion in the programme through the refined DEIS identification model, which is an objective, statistics-based model. Schools were not required to apply for inclusion in the DEIS programme.

The DEIS identification process is based on the principle of concentrated disadvantage and the proportion of students from disadvantaged backgrounds within a school. The DEIS identification model aimed to identify those schools with the highest levels of concentrated disadvantage or the highest proportion of students from disadvantaged backgrounds within a school using the school's enrolment data and national census data as represented by the Pobal HP Deprivation index. A detailed paper on the refined DEIS identification model is available on the gov.ie. website.

The recent expansion will add an additional €32million to the Department’s expenditure on the DEIS programme from 2023. This will bring my Department's allocation to the programme to a total of €180million. I am very conscious of the benefit of the DEIS programme. Analysis has shown that since the programme began in 2006, it has had consid erable impact in our schools and helped to close the gap in achievement between schools serving the highest levels of educational disadvantage and those serving populations with little or no disadvantage.

List of DEIS primary schools broken down per county for the last 3 years