Éamon Ó Cuív presses for clarity on DESH school model

I would like to thank the Minister particularly for coming in herself this evening to answer the question. There were some schools that were disappointed and surprised that they were not included in Daesh. I understand that it is a process where the Department, as far as it has access to data, has used objective data to try to determine which schools should be part of the system. My understanding, Minister, is that the PAD information given is name, address, air code, PPS number, pupil ID number, gender, nationality, is the mother tongue English or Irish, ethnic cultural background, presumably that means Roma, travel, etc., and religion. And that the other source of data is the PUBL HP Deprivation Index small area data. So my understanding is you put that into your mixer, your food mixer, and it is a little bit of that and a little bit of the other. What I want to know, first of all, is which of those details do you clearly use, you have already said it, the small area data, and what weighting do you give to each index? So, for example, you know where the children all live, because you have their air codes. You know nationality if you do, and these are the kind of questions that I think need to be clarified. What happens if one parent is Irish and one parent is non-Irish? Does it depend on where the child was born? What happens if both parents are naturalised Irish and the child was born here? And so on and so on. In other words, because the information you have is fairly scant, how do you actually work this out? Because schools will be looking at this and they will be saying, hang on a second, was the information we gave accurate? Did it reflect all these possibilities? And we never realised that such a major decision would be made in relation to our scheme based on this data. Another issue that arises here is ethnic or cultural background. And let's take that that means Roma and traveller, and you specifically mentioned, in fairness to you, education disadvantage experienced by traveller and Roma learners. But here again we might have a challenge, and I don't know how we are going to deal with it, but I want to highlight it here this evening, that a lot of people from a traveller or Roma background might not identify as such for various reasons. They might not identify, and I think there were some interesting examples of that on the television on Clare Burn last night, where people said they hid their identity for fear that it would be a disadvantage to them. I remember a parent coming to me, a traveller parent, and she was really suspicious as to why the school, when she was enrolling the child, wanted to know whether the parent was a traveller or not, because she felt that if she said yes, it might be a reason that the school would use, which the school wouldn't have used, I know that, but she didn't know that, would choose to not accept the pupil in the school. Now, some schools who, I have two schools in particular that seem to have an odd situation, one in the school that everyone would say was very, very mixed nationality, very, very mixed in terms of the background of the children, in an area that certainly is not that affluent. And for the second time it has missed out on the scheme where other schools in the same area that would seem more advantaged have been in and we don't begrudge that. And the second one was an island school, where one school on the island was in and the other school on the same island was out, which seems, you know, unusual. But again, I think we knew the matrix in detail, at least people would have some understanding how you got the answer. Thank you, Deputy. Delivering equality of opportunity in schools is the main policy initiative of my department to tackle educational disadvantage at school level. Schools in the DESH programme avail of a range of targeted supports aimed at tackling educational disadvantage, including additional classroom teaching posts, homeschool community liaison coordinator posts, DESH grant funding and access to the school completion programme. On 9 March, I was very pleased to announce the expansion of the DESH programme. This will see the programme extended to an additional 310 schools. In addition, 37 existing DESH schools are being reclassified and eligible for increased supports. These schools were identified as having the highest levels of educational disadvantage. This now means that in the 2022-23 school year, there will be 1,194 schools in the DESH programme, 960 in primary and 234 post-primary. From next September, over 240,000 students, or nearly one in four students, will be supported in the programme. This is the largest ever single investment in the programme and will extend DESH status to schools serving the highest proportions of pupils at risk of educational disadvantage. From 2023, the Department of Education will spend in the region of €180 million on the DESH programme, an increase of €32 million. This announcement follows an extensive body of work by the DESH technical group to develop the refined DESH identification model, to identify the concentrated levels of disadvantage of schools. Schools were identified for inclusion in the programme through the refined DESH identification model, which is an objective statistics-based model. The model was applied equally to all schools. The model uses address information which schools provide under their annual returns to the Department. These addresses were then combined with the PUBL HP Deprivation Index, which is a method of measuring the relative affluence or disadvantage of a particular geographical area. The HP Index divides the country into approximately 18,500 small areas with approximately 100 dwellings in each. The refined DESH identification model being applied for schools in 2022 builds on the objectivity and fairness of the 2017 version, but now captures a greater breadth of disadvantage and accounts for severity of disadvantage through the application of a weighted process. The DESH identification model takes into consideration the significant educational disadvantage experienced by Traveller and Roma learners, and by students residing in direct provision or indeed students residing in emergency homeless accommodation. Schools were not required to apply for inclusion in the DESH programme, and the model has been fairly and equally applied to all schools. In order to ensure that all schools are treated equally and fairly, schools that have not been included in the programme at this time will have an opportunity to have the decision reviewed. The Department of Education will provide further information in the coming days on this appeals process on the Department's website. The Minister, I would like to thank you for the reply, but the reply to a certain extent reminded me of Jim Figarty long ago. Now you are probably too young to have ever heard of Jim Figarty, but Jim Figarty was this mythical figure who used to get the figs into the fig rolls, and he went missing, and the story that the certain biscuit manufacturer had was that nobody would ever find out how to get the figs into the fig rolls, and that they were in serious trouble. Now, I still haven't found out how to get the figs into the fig rolls. In other words, you told me there was a weighted process. I have asked in my question, and I was very specific about this, but the actual logarithms, the actual weightings, is it 10 marks for air coat? In other words, for the small area statistics, 5 marks for being Roma, 20 marks for being traveller, or 20 marks for being Roma, and 5 marks for being traveller. What is it? What are all these weightings and figures? And how is the actual calculation carried out? And I think it is only fair in the interest of transparency that the department would give the detailed mathematical formula that they used, so that people in making appeals actually know how they failed to get into the scheme, and what information carries the most weight. And, as I said, a school might find out that, for example, it understated the number Roma or the number of travellers. You obviously use nationality here, in other words, where people are mother tongue and so on. So, I was wondering, will you be able to give, publish the whole weighting, the whole mathematical formula, or a logarithm as they now call it? And, secondly, will you actually be given the breakdown of the assessment of each individual school, showing exactly how you arrived at the conclusion for each school that failed to get in? The Department of Education has engaged with school management bodies and unions to outline the development of the DESH identification model. I do want to say that from the outset, they have very much so engaged with management bodies and unions in the outlining of the development of the model. In the coming days, further information will be made available on the Department's website on the development and implementation of the DESH identification model. This will provide a clear outline to schools and how the information provided by them on the student enrolment database was used in conjunction with the HP index data to identify schools with the highest levels of educational disadvantage for inclusion in the DESH programme. I think it is important to say, Deputy, that the identification process was applied equally to every school across the country. And the HP index, as was employed by the DESH model, is also the HP index that is employed across a number of government departments, whether it is justice or health or social welfare or public whatever. It is a tool that measures relative advantage or disadvantage. There are 18,500 small areas of approximately 100 dwellings, and the purpose is to identify not individual but pockets of concentration, what they are calling cumulative disadvantage, because it is acknowledged from national studies, international studies, where you have an accumulation of disadvantage in an area that is an even more significant disadvantage to a student. So it is for that purpose that we have this model, so that targeted interventions can take place where there is cumulative disadvantage. The data that was relied upon is the data, as you have referenced from the POD and the PPOD databases, identical across all school data, and that was combined with the HP index. The weightings that you reference, very specifically, that is in the POD and PPOD. Thank you, Minister. Oh, yes. Thank you, see you. Thank you. Thank you very much for this side. Good bye.