Joan Collins
Question:105. Deputy Joan Collins asked the Minister for Education the process used for advertising for the STEM grant in December 2023; and the process for the selection of schools for the STEM grant. [5868/24]
View answerTuesday, 13 February 2024
Questions (105)
Written answers
I can advise the deputy that notification of the STEM grants was as follows
• announced via press release on the 6 November 2023
• advertised in the Department of Education STEM Newsletter which was emailed to all primary and post-primary schools on the 8 November 2023
• Fortnightly updates issue to schools from the Department of Education to act as a reminder for press releases, consultations, circulars and other announcements. The STEM grant press release was featured in the 9 November 2023 update to schools.
• An email was sent to all schools and an update was put out on the schools system ‘Esinet’ on the 27 November alerting schools to the extension of the deadline for receipt of applications to 30 November 2023.
The STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) grant scheme was an action in the new STEM Education Implementation Plan published in 2023. The grant was to support schools in carrying out projects to stimulate an increased interest in STEM and included an application process as with other STEM initiatives in the past such as the STEM clusters project.
When the grant scheme was announced the Department indicated that it had funding of €1.5m available. There was a phenomenal demand from schools with around 3,000 applications received. Every application received by the deadline of 5pm on the 30th October was read and processed, leaving 2,727 schools with an ask amounting to over €25m.
Given the very high number of valid applications and the budget available for the scheme, a decision was made by the Department to run a lottery, where a random number generator was used to pick out schools based on their line on the spreadsheet. The application for each school was then assessed on a case by case basis with the applications read again by the evaluation team to ensure they met the requirements as set out in the grant call. Any school deemed not to have met the requirements was removed. The procedure was then repeated until all the budget available was allocated. In total there were 530 schools that were awarded grants and of those 146 were DEIS schools.
My Department is front loading the grant scheme in 2023/2024 school year and it is hoped that a further round of funding can be run this year. This means that eligible schools that were not successful this time may receive funding in the future. The Department will be in contact with schools in relation to any future funding that becomes available.