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 these universal supports, the DEIS programme provides a targeted and equitable way to address concentrated educational disadvantage that promotes equity and has benefits for students.
As part of Budget 2023, I secured over €8 million to specifically enhance school attendance, participation, and retention. I had previously allocated a 5% increase in funding for the School Completion Programme, and in September I announced that the remaining balance of over €6 million would be committed to an Attendance Campaign Support Grant for all schools.
Schools will receive this grant this week. It will enable all schools to develop and implement targeted interventions to improve attendance and is designed to support and augment the School Attendance Campaign which is running through this school year. Guidance has also been issued to schools to provide advice on using available data to target supports and to provide schools with examples of good practice and initiatives that have been successful in the past.
This grant allocation follows on from the major investment of over €50 million to provide free schoolbooks in recognised primary schools and special schools.
My Department now spends approximately €180million annually providing additional supports to the region of 1,200 schools in the DEIS programme. This includes an additional €32m allocated following my announcement to extend the programme to an additional 322 schools from last September. This now means that approximately 240,000 students or 1 in 4 of all students are now supported in the programme.
Within the DEIS programme, the highest levels of resources are targeted at those primary schools with the highest levels of concentrated educational disadvantage.
My Department is continuing to undertake work towards achieving its vision for an inclusive education system that supports all learners to achieve their potential. It also recognises that we need to target resources to those schools who need them most. That is why my Department is undertaking a programme of work to explore the allocation of resources to schools to address educational disadvantage. To support this work my Department have invited the OECD Strength Through Diversity: Education for Inclusive Societies Project to review the current policy approach for the allocation of resources to support students at risk of educational disadvantage in Ireland. This review will provide an independent expert opinion on the current resource allocation model for the DEIS programme and, drawing on international examples, inform a policy approach for an equitable distribution of supplementary resources to support students at risk of educational disadvantage attending all schools, both DEIS and non-DEIS. In September, the Social Inclusion Unit of the Department organised and hosted the OECD review team visit to Ireland. The team visited a selection of schools both within and outside of the DEIS program. They also had further engagements with a comprehensive range of other stakeholders
The OECD review is being complimented by a programme of work by my Department, which will look at reviewing individual resources and allocation approaches. This work will consider the allocation of resources within the DEIS programme. It will also seek to ensure that schools are supported to ensure every child has an equal opportunity to achieve their potential.
