Dáil Éireann debate -
Thursday, 17 Oct 2024

Deputies Bríd Smith and Cian O'Callaghan send their apologies. I thank the House for selecting this slot and for the Minister of State for taking it. This really flows from an audiovisual room briefing that we hosted last week. It was with a group of principals from about 30 schools from some of the most generationally disadvantaged areas in the country, including Tallaght, Ballymun and Darndale, who have been pushing very impressively for the establishment of a new category of DEIS+ for primary schools. I pay tribute to those principals who obviously have a lot of work to do in their day jobs and yet manage to find the time to come together to campaign for this category that would make a meaningful difference for the children they are currently teaching, for other children in their communities, and for children into the future.

The idea of DEIS+ is to give additional supports to the most socioeconomically and generationally disadvantaged primary schools in the country. The idea of it is summed up with the notion that the greatest level of need should get the greatest level of support. The surveys done and the evidence from 17 different schools that were surveyed, including a number of schools in west Tallaght, underline the point of the need for this establishment of a new band. A spring 2024 survey of those 17 schools found that nearly half of the school students had experienced a serious direct trauma, such as homelessness, abuse, bereavement, suicide, crime, violence or addiction. These schools also have four times the level of additional needs compared to non-DEIS schools. Some 54% of the children have special educational needs compared to 14% in non-DEIS schools. These kids are really up against it. They need additional supports above and beyond what is provided through the current DEIS programme. Multidisciplinary teams of occupational therapists, speech and language therapists, counsellors and psychologists are needed alongside enhanced teacher allocation, extra funding and room space for trauma-informed practice. We are not talking about huge sums of money here. The Government had a €24 billion surplus. The State has enough money to provide for DEIS+. The Department of Education is spending €9 million on mobile phone pockets. It is a question of political priorities. Obviously, this is not going to happen before the next general election. Certainly People Before Profit will be including a call for DEIS+ in its election manifesto. I hope the Green Party and other parties here will be doing likewise.

I join with my other colleagues who put forward this proposal along with the principals because it makes eminent sense. Many people entered this House for many different reasons, to fight many causes, but all of us are united by the idea that there are children who are born who deserve equal opportunity, that they deserve to be supported and that education is a place where that can be done very powerfully. In Fianna Fáil, we are very proud of the DEIS programme. It was something we established in 2004, 20 years ago. You would like to think over 20 years the level of ambition would change. While we have expanded DEIS with additional funding of €32 million and hundreds of additional schools being included only last year, it is time now to look again and see a programme that made a real difference. The OECD review report refers to closing the achievement gaps particularly in reading, retention and in other areas. The programme had a real impact. The question is can we do more. What more can we do now to tackle disadvantage? As to the model of having DEIS+, the asks are very simple. They are not incredibly complex. In many ways, they are the asks that fall into other areas such as children with additional needs and so on. As Deputy Murphy said, it can be delivered with a relatively small amount of money but it requires a shift in the Department now to think what more can be done in the next 20 years. DEIS+ is one of the places in which we can do that.

We are talking about schools here that do not just have a slightly higher level of need; they have an incredibly higher level of need. They are dealing with children where often there is very little family support or where there are very complex needs and in-built trauma not just in one generation but perhaps in two. The teachers are also operating in classes where there are a lot of demands and challenges in the one-class environment. The reduction in the pupil-teacher ratio is really important under DEIS. Can we do more? Nurture rooms, that is, places where people can step out of the classroom environment to regulate emotion and to seek additional support could be provided as could multidisciplinary teams. This is a very positive measure that everybody should be behind.

I echo both my colleagues in respect of this issue about which we met with principals last week. I have said this before but previously I worked in school completion in the Coolock area and was based in Darndale. I spent 16 years in that area working with young people in school completion encouraging, promoting and supporting young people to stay in school longer. When you are working with young people for the length of time you are working with them, you see there are huge needs in different areas and different schools. Each school has its own culture but they also have their own challenges and difficulties. The principals brought up something which is incredibly important when we talk about equality. I will provide a definition. Equality means each individual or group is given the same resources or opportunities. Equity recognises that each person has different circumstances, and allocates the exact resources and opportunities needed to reach an equal outcome. That is where we need to be when we are talking about equality or equity. We need to get to that stage where there is equity. Unfortunately, at this stage, there are demands on those schools. We are talking about a very small number of schools so we are talking about a relatively small amount of money for those particular schools. However, it will make a massive difference to those communities. The effect will not just be felt in those schools where children will be able to learn, have the capacity and space to be dealing with trauma and all of the educational issues and disadvantages they have, but that ripple effect will spread out into the community as well. We will be talking about reducing anti-social behaviour and reducing that sort of environment they are living in at the moment. Something like this DEIS+ is so important. We recognised many years ago that there were specific schools that needed those extra supports. Even though DEIS has quite rightly been rolled out to far more schools than the original cohort, what we are talking about is that this original cohort and some of those schools in the most disadvantaged areas in the country need that extra support. They really need it quickly.

I thank Deputies Murphy, Donnelly and McAuliffe for bringing this important issue to the fore.

The Government is committed to supporting all children and young people to achieve their potential through education and address the barrier of educational disadvantage. In government, the Minister, Deputy Foley, has secured approximately €170 million in funding to provide free school books as a universal support to all primary and post-primary schools in the free education scheme. Since 2020, the Minister has provided three improvements to the teacher allocation schedule to allow for smaller class sizes in primary schools. Supplementing universal supports such as these and the delivering equality of opportunity in schools, DEIS, programme is a key policy initiative of the Department of Education to address concentrated educational disadvantage at school level. All of the Deputies highlighted specific areas and schools where those challenges lie. In 2022, the Minister secured an additional €32 million to extend the programme, meaning almost 1,200 new schools and approximately 240,000 students, or one in four of all students, are now supported in the DEIS programme. The Department of Education now spends over €180 million annually providing additional supports to just under 1,200 schools in the DEIS programme. This funding includes an increased level of support for 306 DEIS urban band 1 schools, those with the highest levels of educational disadvantage. DEIS urban band 1 schools receive access to a more preferable staffing allocation than other schools, meaning that children have more contact time with their teachers. DEIS urban band 1 schools also have access to the support of home school community liaison coordinators, access to the school completion programme, and receive additional funding by way of a DEIS grant. The National Educational Psychological Service, NEPS, provides priority access to their services for schools in this DEIS band. School leaders and teachers in these schools also receive priority access to professional learning through Oide, in order to support them to meet the needs of their pupils.

The Minister, Deputy Foley, and her Department are aware of the proposal referred to by the Deputies and have met a selection of the principals of the schools involved. The Minister recognises that even more work is required to ensure all children, regardless of background, have the opportunity to achieve their potential in education.

To support this work, the Minister, Deputy Foley, invited the OECD 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, published in July this year, found that while Ireland has a comparatively equitable education system, and the DEIS programme is a key instrument in that, gaps remain in relation to the outcomes for children from areas of high deprivation. This bears out what the Deputies have been saying. The Department of Education has been engaging with principals, teachers and school communities in recent months to ensure future policy is informed by the needs of children and young people, and those who work with them. It is currently working with other Departments, agencies and stakeholders across the education sector to develop the recommendations set out in the OECD report into tangible actions, including some that may be implemented in the short term, to support children and young people experiencing disadvantage.

I will come back in later with a supplementary response to the Deputies. The OECD review certainly bears out what the Deputies have said with regard to particular disadvantage, very complex needs and the challenging family situations that many children and young people find themselves in. While the Government is considering this, it is perhaps a matter for the next Government to take on board. Nonetheless, it is a very important area. The work that has been done by the Minister with this OECD review will help to better inform how we provide the additional resources that are required.

That is quite far from saying we are going to agree to introduce a DEIS+ categorisation. At best, it is kicking the can down the road and continuing to look at it. This idea has been out there for a number of years, thanks to the principals who have been pushing it. Everything was pointed towards the OECD report but these principals are not happy with the OECD report. They say that it relied on asking questions of the Department of Education and that when the Department was asked how it was doing, it said it was not doing too badly, when of course it would say that. The principals also say the report ignores the needs of generationally disadvantaged communities.

The Minister of State rightly points to the successes of DEIS, which is fair enough. Those successes illustrate the point that where we give schools, teachers and SNAs the resources, they are able to use them very well in order to have an impact. However, there remain 100 to 150 schools that have particular additional needs. The figures for trauma and additional needs are striking and troubling. We should be putting in the resources to assist those teachers and schools to help the kids, which is the best possible investment we can make at this point in time.

I appreciate the response of the Minister of State. Elections are democratic exercises where we get to press “refresh” on the policy approach taken by different Departments. There is an opportunity, as we head into the coming months, to get unanimity across parties on this point and bring people together so that, no matter who is sitting on the other side of the table negotiating a programme for Government, DEIS+ is a common point of agreement across all of those parties. If that were to happen, I believe the Department officials could be instructed and would deliver in the same way they have delivered on DEIS.

The most important part of this scheme is the multidisciplinary teams. We know that children with additional needs are struggling to get places, treatments and therapies. The Tánaiste said yesterday that he believes the best place to do that is not in the health setting but in the education setting, and I agree with him. In fact, there is great commonality between the position of starting with special schools and progressing on to DEIS schools and the idea of having multidisciplinary teams where therapies can be provided to children with additional needs, including trauma. If that were to happen and we took that step of putting those teams into special schools first, then the DEIS schools should be the next places available as part of a DEIS+ package.

It is very important that we look at what is working. What the principals have told us in the north inner city is that a model has been put in place there to deal with the horrendous situation of the feud in which so many people have been murdered and traumatised. A model has been put in place there so we do not need to reinvent the wheel or undertake trials and studies. The evidence is there. Even the OECD admits that gaps remain in the outcomes for children in areas of high deprivation. We know that on the ground from experience. The principals who are working on the front line and who deal with this, day in, day out, are the people who know what is required. Why? It is because they are doing the job with extremely limited resources. They are dealing with young children and students with high needs with very few resources.

It is important that we look at what is working and then implement that in the areas that are crying out for support. I have worked with schools for many years. Principals do not sit around or waste their time. They are extremely busy people. They have taken it upon themselves to put a network together to demand support, not for themselves or their schools, but for the high needs students in areas of high deprivation. It is the very least we can do for those highly skilled professionals who are doing that work, day in, day out, on the front line.

In response to Deputy Murphy, an extensive consultation was carried out in regard to the OECD review and it met with school leaders, teachers, parents, student organisations, the Society of St. Vincent de Paul, the Children's Rights Alliance and Social Justice Ireland. It was broad and comprehensive. I agree with the three Deputies. Deputy McAuliffe made the point that we should be looking at all of our manifestoes for the general election and making sure this issue crosses the line, if any of us are in a position to negotiate a programme for government after the election. That is very important.

Second, a point was raised about the work already under way in DEIS urban band 1 with regard to access to home-school liaison co-ordinators and enhanced access to NEPS and the school completion programme. All of that backs up what the Deputies are saying. There is also the model of the north-east inner-city multidisciplinary teams, which seem to have worked quite well, and the consideration by the Department to expand that. That includes NEPS, the Department of Education, the HSE, speech and language therapists, occupational therapists and psychologists. It is the multidisciplinary team that the Deputies have been speaking about in the context of a potential DEIS+ programme. In the response I gave earlier, the Department said that multidisciplinary team intervention could be expanded past the ten schools where it has already been set up in the north-east inner-city.

The potential is there. Collectively, we have to look at this in light of the fact we are at the end of a cycle of government. We need to look towards our own manifestoes to ensure we specify DEIS+ in those manifestoes and then look towards a programme for government thereafter.

Ireland is increasingly difficult for young people to grow up in. Sporting activities lead to mounting pressures for both providers and participants as the cost of living and lack of facilities escalate. This is creating increased inequalities in our society and nowhere is it clearer than in Dublin's inner city. The group Sporting Liberties has launched a very strong campaign highlighting the lack of facilities for children in the inner city. Recent reports have shown that thousands of children across the city do not have access to a green area to play on. It is appalling that, in 2024, so many children in our capital city do not have access to the most basic facilities. This is having a damaging impact on society. It is well documented that participation in sport is a key element in building a healthier population and a stronger sense of community. Participation in sport from a young age has been shown to contribute to increasing social cohesion and it leads to greater savings on healthcare the long run.

While there has been a lot of media coverage around the recent sports capital announcements, the figures are clear.

From the grass roots up, sport has been utterly underfunded for decades. Year after year, Eurostat figures have shown that we have one of the worst ratios of GDP devoted to sport and recreation. We cannot plaster over the cracks and expect everything to be fine. We need to see a clear sports facility strategy put in place to identify communities like those in the inner city that are being left behind. We need to see a vision and creativity in the delivery of sports facilities. When I look around Dublin city, the utter lack of sports facilities is a disgrace. You do not need to look any further than Kevin Street. For such a large community, there is one tiny astro pitch near Digges Lane. It is like a stamp but is expected to cater for all the young families living in the area. The former DIT site in Kevin Street had huge potential for community development, affordable housing and leisure facilities but was sold off by the Government to private developers. A large site like that could have delivered modern multi-purpose sports facilities along with public housing for the benefit of the entire community and it would have been good for the city. Instead the Government parties sold it off and now residents are facing that particular development going 12 or 13 storeys high with nothing to benefit the local community. On the other side, the Iveagh Trust is without facilities. Again, it has a postage stamp-sized playing facility to use. The former DIT site on Aungier Street at the other side of this community on Bishop Street is being transferred to private developers who will not develop it for the local community. Again, this is another missed opportunity for the residents of the inner city. People seem to think that Dublin is just for visiting and going to bars. It is a living thriving community. There are so many families living in the inner city and they have been neglected for years. This Government is selling off the assets that could make the city better for families and encourage families to come in but instead it is transferring facilities like the DIT site in Aungier Street and selling the DIT site in Kevin Street and the community is left with nothing. It is forcing families out instead of encouraging them to come in. I ask that we invest in sports facilities in the inner city.

The Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media operates two capital funding programmes for sport, namely the sports capital and equipment programme, SCEP, which is now renamed the community sport facility fund, and the large scale sport infrastructure fund, LSSIF. At the outset, I should note that the provision of recreational and sporting infrastructure in Dublin city is primarily a matter for Dublin City Council through its sports and play policies.

Earlier this year, the Minister for Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media and the Minister of State, Deputy Thomas Byrne, announced funding of up to €120 million under the new 2024 round of the LSSIF, which closed for applications on 1 July 2024. On 25 September, the Minister and the Minister of State announced €230 million in grants for sports clubs and facilities under phase two of the community sport facility fund. Over a quarter of a billion euro has been allocated to community sports clubs and facilities in 2024 taking account of the earlier equipment-only allocation of €26 million with a total investment of €256 million. This will facilitate the largest-ever investment in sports facilities in communities across Ireland, including Dublin inner city.

Since 1998, over 13,000 projects have benefited from sports capital funding bringing the total allocations in that time to over €1.15 billion. We all agree that the SCEP has transformed the sporting landscape with improved sports facilities in every town and village in the country. The programme for Government commits to continuing the SCEP and to targeting the investment in disadvantaged areas. As well as being open to individual sports clubs, applications are also accepted from local authorities. Dublin City Council has received significant grant funding for sports facilities projects, including sports pitches used by football clubs. Since 2000, a total of €35 million has been allocated to Dublin City Council under the SCEP.

The 2023 round of the SCEP closed for applications on 8 September 2023. A record number of 3,210 applications was received under the 2023 round, including ten applications from Dublin City Council. Any application for funding will be considered on its merits based on the agreed scoring system. The schemes favour projects that will increase participation and promote sharing of facilities among a number of sports and-or clubs. Priority is always given to applications from disadvantaged areas.

I emphasise that the Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sports and Media’s sports capital programmes are demand-driven and do not support land or property acquisition. In relation to land or property acquisition, I would consider that question more appropriately addressed to the relevant local authority, including in relation to overall local planning and development policies as agreed by the local elected representatives - in this case, Dublin City Council.

As a Government, we are determined to increase the level of participation in sport and physical activity across the whole population in line with our national sports policy 2018 to 2027. In pursuit of that objective, the Government is committed to a "sport for all" approach aimed at ensuring that all persons have the opportunity to partake equally in sport and physical activity regardless of gender, age, socioeconomic status, disability, or membership of minority groups such as the LGBTI+ community, the Traveller community or other ethnic minorities.

The Dormant Accounts Fund sports programme is the primary funding stream deployed exclusively to promote increased sports participation amongst disadvantaged communities and people with a disability. This programme provides financial supports to a wide range of locally inspired community projects undertaken by local sports clubs, associations and other interested parties generally under the active guidance of the 29 local sports partnerships around the country.

Last October, a new European Social Fund Plus, ESF+, programme was launched with Sport Ireland entitled, Sport 4 Empowerment. This new programme aims to develop innovative social inclusion programmes through the use of sport and physical activity with a specific focus on individuals at risk of social exclusion and poverty.

The announcement of funding and grants is all well and good but how much of it is making its way down to the local community? You do not have to go too far from here to see. Someone living in Pearse House or Markievicz House has almost no good-quality sports or leisure facilities, so the Minister of State can spin and make announcements but families in Pearse House, Markievicz House and Leo Fitzgerald House do not have the facilities they deserve and should have. While we are all talking about announcements and figures, it does not reach ordinary working families in the inner city to make the inner city a more welcoming and friendly place in which to bring up your family. We have seen announcement after announcement of increased funding to the LSSIF but according to a reply to a parliamentary question on the fund, out of the €120 million in allocations announced over the years, barely €10 million has been drawn down so something is not working.

While it is great to see such an increase in funding for the community sport facility fund, by the look of it, it is like "The Late Late Show" - one for everybody in the audience but not delivering any infrastructure, particularly for inner-city communities. In some cases, we see sports clubs being awarded half of what they applied for, which as one applicant said, means that they will not be able to deliver the project. They feel lost because they cannot the thousands of euro required to finish the project. While recent changes around donations to sports clubs will benefit many clubs across the city, it needs to be recognised that these changes will primarily benefit sports clubs in more affluent areas. What is the Government going to do to counter this initiative around tax incentives for sports clubs in more affluent areas? What is it going to do to ensure that the gap in respect of inner-city communities is not increased?

They are very valid points. Critically, this lies with Dublin City Council and its elected members. They develop very proactive sports and play policies. One day I toured some of the pocket parks and play facilities with Dublin City Council which is doing really innovative work. It is increasingly trying to fit them in smaller sites. Weaver Park is a great example. Those small facilities can make a big difference to small localised communities in inner-city Dublin.

Regarding the point on the LSSIF and the two grant schemes, they are under constant review. There has been feedback from some community groups that the grants do not go far enough.

However, from the experience we have throughout the country, they are most welcome and give that uplift to an awful lot of sporting clubs and communities. It is critically important, when planning in the inner city, that a local authority can optimise spaces where it can make allocation for a sports facility. I take on board the point the Deputy made regarding the DIT site or other sites across inner-city Dublin. These are prime sites for development but we have to be mindful that families and communities live in these parts of the city as well. It is very important that the local authority strikes a right balance. The grant schemes are there if the projects can be identified by the local authority and by local communities.