Violet-Anne Wynne
Question:86. Deputy Violet-Anne Wynne asked the Minister for Education the status of the DEIS bands reassessment as committed to earlier in 2021. [45194/21]
View answerThursday, 23 September 2021
Questions (86)
Written answers
A key part of the DEIS Plan was the introduction of a new DEIS identification process based on an objective, statistics based model to determine which schools merit inclusion in the DEIS programme. An extensive body of work has been undertaken in terms of the refinement of this model, based on the latest school enrolment data and data available from Census 2016 under the HP Deprivation Index.
A detailed quality analysis of the data has been carried out by members of the DEIS Technical Group which contains representatives of the Department’s Statistics and Social Inclusion Units, the Inspectorate and the Educational Research Centre. My Department has commenced a consultation process with education partners on the technical aspects of this model, and work is now ongoing on final elements of the model.
It is envisaged that this will provide the basis for the development and application of a refined DEIS resource allocation model to ultimately match resources to identified need. All schools will be considered for inclusion under the refined DEIS model. Until this work is complete, it is not intended to extend the DEIS programme to any further schools.
Nonetheless, additional resources have been made available to DEIS schools in order to address educational disadvantage, such as an increase in the budget of the School Completion Programme, the expanded Summer Programme which ran this year and the reduction in pupil-teacher ratio for DEIS Band 1 schools.