Dept of Education methodology explained

We get many queries regarding how the Department of Education uses data to decide which areas require a new school. Dr. JoAnne Mancini from Maynooth University published her report ‘Children from these communities’: unequal school provision, segregation, and the Irish educational landscape' in 2022, and gave the below outline regarding the Dept. of Educaiton (DES) methodology. (This is an extract from the full report. See link below for the full report). With thanks to Dr. Mancini for sharing.

DES methodology in context

Dublin's educational landscape was neither standardised nor equal in 2016. Although state investment in education was thick in DSCSPA's uniformly affluent eastern reaches, it was much thinner towards the planning area's socioeconomically mixed (and historically working-class) western edge. Nonetheless, when the DES established a new school in DSCSPA in 2016, it located it in Dublin 4 rather than in the area of greater need in Dublin 8 – before announcing in 2018 that it would establish a second new school in Dublin 2/4 in 2021 (DES Citation2018). Moreover, when in 2019, the DES decided to establish a further school with the name DSCETSS (following the renaming of the original), it did not site it in Dublin 8, either. Thus the paper's final aim is to identify the DES's methodology for making these decisions and to evaluate its suitability for promoting educational equality.

Between 2011 and 2021, stated DES policy mandated the establishment of new schools ‘only where warranted by increased demographics’.Footnote⁹ However, the DES published neither reviews of CSO data nor annualised national accounts of where it planned to establish new schools. Rather, it announced school-establishment decisions on an ad-hoc basis and often published the ‘demographic’ analysis underpinning such decisions as an adjunct to documents reporting the awarding of patronage – documents that became less accessible with the 2021 replacement of the DES's website.

This was the case with DSCETSS, where the DES presented ‘demographic details’ in the patronage-assessment document Attachment No. 8 (DES Citation2016b). These clearly depicted Dublin 8 as experiencing both population growth (potentially ‘2135 extra pupils’ by 2026) and a deficit of school places – while showing that in Dublin 2/4 and Dublin 6 enrolments (of 2707 and 4060 pupils) were ‘projected to continue’ at the same level. However, Attachment No. 8 also contained a second set of figures, embedded into the same text, whereby the DES reduced the projected deficit in Dublin 8 from 2135 school places to only 651 while transforming projected demographic stasis in Dublin 2/4 and Dublin 6 into deficits of 2075 and 722 places. To quote (bold in original):

Dublin 2/4

Demographic analysis shows that the enrolment figure for the Dublin 2/4 school planning area, based on 100% intake, is projected to continue at the current high level of 2,707 for a number of years to come. The actual intake at post-primary level in the Dublin 2/4 school planning area is currently 205%. At the current level of intake, enrolments would increase to approximately 4,782 pupils by 2025. This is a potential 2,075 extra pupils.

Dublin 6/Clonskeagh

Demographic analysis shows that the enrolment figure for the Dublin 6/Clonskeagh school planning area, based on 100% intake, is projected to continue at the current high level of 4,060 pupils for a number of years to come. The actual intake at post-primary level in the Dublin 6/Clonskeagh school planning area is currently 178%. At the current level of intake, enrolments would increase to approximately 4,782 pupils by 2025. This is a potential 722 extra pupils.

Dublin 8

Demographic analysis shows that the enrolment figure for the Dublin 8 school planning area is projected to grow to approximately 3,116 pupils by the year 2026 based on an average intake across the school planning area of 100%. This is a potential 2,135 extra pupils requiring school places compared to the 2015/2016 enrolment of 981 pupils. However, the actual intake at post-primary level in the Dublin 8 school planning area is currently 56%. At the current level of intake, enrolments would increase to approximately 1,632 pupils by 2026. This is a potential 651 extra pupils.

What, then, accounted for the DES's radical amendments to its own figures – amendments that effectively excluded Dublin 8 from receiving a new school? Despite the importance of the decision, Attachment No. 8 offered no explanation. However its references to ‘actual intakes’ did point to the general design of DES methodology elaborated elsewhere, wherein ‘intake patterns’ (also called ‘transfer rates’) are ratios the DES generates by comparing the number of children enrolled in an area's post-primary schools to primary school enrolments. Thus as it explained (DES Citation2019, 4), if ‘the intake pattern is less than 100% … some children are travelling to school outside the school planning area. If the intake pattern is greater than 100% … children are travelling into schools … from other school planning areas’.

DES ‘intake patterns’ thus resembled the provision-per-child ratios presented in this paper – but with an important difference. This paper uses such ratios to identify inequalities in educational provision, and proposes the principle that areas with fewer school places than children need investment more than areas where provision is greater than 100%. In contrast, the DES treated the maintenance of ‘intake patterns’ as a policy imperative, using ‘the average intake pattern over a number of years  …  to project the likely demand over the coming years assuming a continuation of the same pattern’ (DES Citation2019). By this logic, Dublin 2/4 ‘needed’ two school places per child because its ‘actual intake’ was 205% – whereas in Dublin 8, only half of children required local school provision because the ‘actual intake’ was 56%.

Thus in 2016, the DES explicitly accepted and planned for the outward migration of 2135 children from Dublin 8 for post-primary education. Moreover, its decision not to establish a new school in Dublin 8 also had harmful long-term implications. In the context of rising student numbers, the non-establishment of a school in Dublin 8 effectively reset its ‘intake pattern’ to 31% – thus further reducing the likelihood that a new school would ever be established there.

As damningly, the DES did not even apply this alchemical methodology consistently. Hence in 2019, having decided to establish a second DSCETSS, it published another set of ‘Demographic Details’ (DES Citation2019). This new analysis reduced the 2016 projection of ‘722 extra pupils’ in Dublin 6 to a requirement for 549 new places – a figure below the deflated calculation of need on which Dublin 8 had been excluded. However, the DES did not reconsider that decision. Instead, it reached beyond DCC into the suburbs, joining Dublin 6 to Dublin 6W in a ‘regional solution’. What problem that ‘regional solution’ solved is anyone's guess, given that the DES itself estimated that Dublin 6W (where average commutes were as short as 16.5 min in Terenure C) would only need 236 temporary post-primary places before a ‘subsequent projected reduction of 567 (pupils) by 2029’ (DES Citation2019). Nonetheless, the DES determined that the need in Dublin 6/6W was sufficiently pressing to mandate the location of DSCETSS2 in Rathmines West A (19.3 min) – an ED which was not even in DSCSPA.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03323315.2022.2118152