Jennifer Murnane O'Connor (Carlow-Kilkenny, Fianna Fail)
Link to this: Individually | In context | Oireachtas source

68. To ask the Minister for Education and Skills if she will provide an update on a school building project (details supplied) in Carlow and the DEIS status of a school in Bagenalstown. [13925/23]

Norma Foley (Kerry, Fianna Fail)
Link to this: Individually | In context | Oireachtas source

This major building project for St Mary’s Academy CBS is included in my Department’s school building programme which is being delivered under the National Development Plan. It is being delivered under my Department's ADAPT Programme.

ADAPT is an acronym for the "Accelerated Delivery of Architectural Planning and Tendering" and uses a professional external Project Manager to co-ordinate and drive the Design Team to achieve the best possible timeframe for the project through the stages of Architectural Planning, to Tender and Construction.

The agreed preferred design option is the provision of a New Replacement School Building and the demolition of the current buildings, and all associated site works.

The building project is currently at an early stage of Architectural Planning – Stage 2(a) – Developed Design, where the design is developed to a stage where it can be fully cost planned and prepared to lodge for statutory approvals.

The Stage 2(a) Stakeholders Meeting was held on December 2nd 2022, and in order to address comments raised during the meeting, the Design Team were requested to submit a Stage 2(a) Addendum report to my Department for review. The Addendum has recently been received by my Department.

Upon review and approval of the Addendum, the project will be progressed to Stage 2(b) – Detailed Design, where the Design Team secure all statutory approvals and prepare the suite of tender documents.

St Mary’s Academy CBS is part of a strong pipeline of school building projects for delivery under the Government’s National Development Plan. This strong investment by Government recognises the importance of adding capacity and modernising facilities in our schools. The use of project manager supports, such as in the case of this school, is helping to facilitate the delivery of projects as quickly as possible. This also helps to ease the burden on the school authority.

In relation to DEIS, 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 the universal supports available to all schools, the Delivering Equality of Opportunity in Schools (DEIS) Programme is a key policy initiative to address concentrated educational disadvantage at school level in a targeted and equitable way across the primary and post-primary sector.

In March last year, I announced a major expansion of the DEIS programme which means that, for the first time since 2017, the programme was significantly expanded to an additional 322 schools. The programme now includes over 1,200 schools and supports approximately 240,000 students. This means 1 in 4 of all students are now supported in the programme.

This recent expansion will add an additional €32million to my Department’s expenditure on the DEIS programme from 2023, bringing the overall Department of Education allocation for the programme to €180 million.

Schools were identified for inclusion in the programme through the refined DEIS identification model, which is an objective, statistics-based model.

The school referred to by the Deputy did not qualify for DEIS Status in the 2022 expansion of the 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 which is publicly available.

A detailed paper on the refined DEIS identification model is available on gov.ie at www.gov.ie/en/publication/a3c9e-extension-of-deis-to-further-schools/#how-schools-were-selected-for-inclusion-in-deis