The West Connemara cluster is one of 25 such groupings being established nationally under the rural phase of the Breaking the Cycle initiative. This initiative seeks to target special supports on selected urban and rural schools which have been identified as being particularly disadvantaged.
I must emphasise that the criteria used in selecting schools for inclusion in this initiative and the selection process itself were devised and carried out by the Education Research Centre following detailed consideration of a range of indicators of educational disadvantage.
In the case of the rural phase of the initiative, the centre concluded that the initiative should focus on schools with fewer than five teachers and whose proximity to each other was such as to create a cluster which can reasonably be served by one locally-based co-ordinator. Unfortunately, on the basis of these criteria, Ballyconneely national school was not selected by the centre for inclusion in the initiative.