Thomas Gould (Cork North Central, Sinn Fein)
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66. To ask the Minister for Education and Skills the number of secondary school pupils enrolled in the 2022-2023 academic year. [26505/23]

Norma Foley (Kerry, Fianna Fail)
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As per the 2022-2023 preliminary enrolment data, published in December 2022, link below, there are 406,457 pupils in post primary schools in the country. www.gov.ie/en/collection/63363b-data-on-individual-schools/

Please note this preliminary enrolment data will be replaced by the final enrolment data for 2022-2023 which will be published in June 2023.

Thomas Gould (Cork North Central, Sinn Fein)
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67. To ask the Minister for Education and Skills the number of secondary school pupils enrolled in DEIS schools in the 2022-2023 academic year. [26506/23]

Norma Foley (Kerry, Fianna Fail)
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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 of my Department 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 the single largest expansion of the DEIS programme. This benefited 361 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 €180million.

There are 103,657 post primary pupils enrolled in DEIS schools. The category breakdown of this by school type is 27,933 Secondary, 56,712 Vocational, 17,048 Community and 1,964 Comprehensive.