Aengus Ó Snodaigh (Dublin South Central, Sinn Fein)
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155. To ask the Minister for Education and Skills what supports are available to newly established schools located in areas with socio-economic deficiencies and who have not been able to qualify for recognition as a Deis school due to the year of its opening; and if she will make a statement on the matter. [17751/26]

Hildegarde Naughton (Galway West, Fine Gael)
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Addressing educational disadvantage is a priority for me as Minister for Education and Youth. The DEIS programme is a key policy initiative for addressing concentrated educational disadvantage at school level. The department provides a range of supports that are available to all schools to help address educational disadvantage and create a more inclusive education system.

The following supports are available to all schools:

The Inspectorate provides advice to help early learning and care settings, schools, and other education settings to help improve education provision for all children and young people. They promote best practice and school improvement by advising teachers, principals and boards of management in schools.

NEPS provides educational psychological service to all primary and post-primary schools and special schools to support the well-being, academic, social and emotional development of all learners. The service provides access for all schools to:

• Psychological support in the event of a Critical Incident;
• A Casework service for individual children where there is a need for intensive consultation and assessment via a NEPS Psychologist or through the scheme for the Commissioning of Psychological Assessments;
• A school Staff Support and Development Service, to build school capability to provide comprehensive continuum of support in schools; and
• Ongoing access to advice and support for schools.

The Special Education Teaching (SET) allocation provides a unified allocation for special education support teaching needs to each school based on each school’s educational profile and also encompasses an element of Language (EAL) support allocation. Under this SET model, schools are frontloaded with resources to provide support immediately to those pupils who need it without delay.

The Programme for Government acknowledges that education should be inclusive of all students, recognising that particular students may need particular supports. It commits to continue work to address all forms of disadvantage in education and promote inclusivity and to provide free schoolbooks to all children in the free education system and introduce changes as needed to the operation of this scheme. The free schoolbooks scheme was extended to students in Senior Cycle, including Transition Year, in recognised post-primary schools in the Free Education Scheme from the start of the 2025/26 school year.

The total allocation in 2025 to implement the free schoolbooks schemes in all primary, special and post-primary schools in the Free Education Scheme was €170 million.

The School Meals Programme through Department of Social Protection provides regular, nutritious food to children to support them in taking full advantage of the education provided to them. The programme is an important component of policies to encourage school attendance and extra curricular achievement. The Hot School Meals Programme is available to all primary schools, meaning that approximately 3,700 schools and organisations and 682,000 children are now eligible for the Schools Meals Programme.

For the 2024/25 academic year the Department of Social Protection allocated approximately €248 million for the School Meals Programme. This funding supported the provision of hot school meals for approximately 550,000 children.

The Department is currently progressing work on the new DEIS Strategy to 2035, which will be published in the coming weeks. A key part of this work involves examining how we can ensure that resources continue to be targeted towards schools with the highest levels of educational disadvantage in a fair and transparent manner.

As part of the strategy, the Department is reviewing the current DEIS Framework, with a view to refining how disadvantage is measured and how schools are supported. This process takes account of a range of evidence and stakeholder feedback to ensure that schools serving significant levels of need are appropriately recognised in the updated model.

Over the lifetime of the strategy, the refinement of the DEIS model will consider how emerging or evolving patterns of disadvantage can be better addressed and how the system can best respond to schools that face increasing levels of need.