An Cathaoirleach: ...On the agenda for today's meeting is an update on the DEIS and DEIS plus programmes. I warmly welcome the following Department of Education and Youth officials who have joined us today.

We have Ms Cliodhna O’Neill, assistant secretary with responsibility for schools, social inclusion and youth affairs; Ms Grainne Cullen, principal officer in the social inclusion unit in the Department; Mr. Micheál Killilea, assistant principal officer in the social inclusion unit; Mr. Paul Alexander, senior statistician, Central Statistics Office, who is on secondment to the Department of Education and Youth; and Mr. Brendan Doody, principal officer in the special education section. Cuirim fáilte chomh maith roimh ár gcúntóirí as Oileán Árainn Mhór, Contae Dhún na nGall, agus na mic léinn san idirbhliain. They are all very welcome. Some people have joined us from Árainn Mhór, and we also have some transition year students present. We hope it will be an exciting meeting. These meetings are not usually better than anything they might see in the cinema or on Netflix, but we will try. We cannot guarantee it will be box office, but they are very welcome nonetheless.

We will begin with the opening statement, which Ms O’Neill will provide on behalf of the Department. She will have five minutes to do so. We will have questions from members thereafter...

... Dr. Paul Alexander: As Ms O'Neill said, the identification model identifies priority cohorts. It looks at Traveller and Roma and students who are living in IPAS centres or experience homelessness recently and it scores them high. Then, what we look for is the concentration of those within a school. We do not comment on individual schools here but what I can say categorically is that if a school is in DEIS plus, it has a higher concentration of those priority cohorts or children living in extremely deprived areas than any school that is not included in DEIS plus. We gather the evidence across both systems in the Department, the primary online database and the post-primary online database. We use that to identify the ethnicity of the pupils. We use it to identify where they live. We look at the disadvantage and then we look for other indicators across the dataset. Based on that, we score the deprivation within the schools and it is the schools, as Ms O'Neill has said, with the highest levels of disadvantage that are included in DEIS plus.

Deputy Ruth Coppinger: Does it take in criminality in an area?

Dr. Paul Alexander: There is no direct-----

Deputy Ruth Coppinger: I mean drugs, criminality, violence or gangland crime prevalence?

Dr. Paul Alexander: The crime data is not available to the Department of education directly. The CSO collects some data but it is in aggregate from. However, the deprivation index is known to be highly correlated with things like drug use, local crime rates and other social pressures. The fact that we are taking into account where the pupils live - it is not about the geographical location of the school, it is about the pupils who attend that school - means we know where they come from and we can identify if they are a priority cohort. That is very much built into the model in terms of the deprivation index....

...Deputy Darren O'Rourke: That answers the question. There has been a lot of discussion here about the criteria. Dr. Alexander and others mentioned a number of times that the Department is always looking to access data. It would like data on the level of household deprivation. Specifically what additional information is it seeking? I raised points about local crime rates, for example, if there is a drugs feud or particular local circumstances that may are may not be captured in the data the Department is looking at. Are there specific pieces that the Department is missing that it would like and, if so, what are they, in order of priority?

Dr. Paul Alexander: The international evidence would suggest that the educational attainment of the mother within the household is a really strong indicator for household-level deprivation. We do not have access to that data in the Department of education, but the CSO has access to it. The CSO has access to lots of data, with exceptions around health data because permission needs to be given by the Minister for Health for data to go into the CSO for statistical purposes.

There is a complete derogation for crime data, which cannot flow in for statistical purposes. There are certain arrangements regarding the PULSE dataset but, as the Deputy knows, there are some challenges in terms of the quality of that data and creating accurate statistics from it. We are trying to use the HP deprivation index strategically because it is very strongly correlated, inversely or otherwise, with things like drug support services and crime rates. It really is a catch-all and a safety net for us. However, we are trying to get access to other datasets that would give us household-level indicators.

Deputy Darren O'Rourke: I would appreciate if Dr. Alexander would take that point away from the meeting. Obviously, it would be useful for us to know exactly what he means when he says there are other datasets he is looking to access.

Dr. Paul Alexander: The one-parent family payment has been identified by the CSO as being very strongly correlated with deprivation. That is one dataset we are actively trying to work with...

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