In a concerted move to address educational disadvantage Minister for Education and Science Mary Hanafin is to announce a new five-year action plan and the creation of 300 new posts for schools in poorer areas at today's teacher conferences. Seán Flynn, Education Editor, reports.
It is expected the new posts will involve teaching jobs and a range of positions, including new home school liaison officers and experts in literacy and numeracy.
The posts will be filled at both primary and second level.
Ms Hanafin is also expected to signal a streamlining of her department's entire programme on educational disadvantage.
The Minister, who has made educational disadvantage her top policy priority, has been assessing the department's €500 million programme to combat the problem.
Her new five-year action plan is designed to deliver a more integrated and targeted approach to disadvantage.
A confidential department report, leaked to The Irish Times yesterday, underlined the scale of the problems in disadvantaged areas. It found that schools in poorer areas are struggling to cope with a numeracy and literacy crisis. Over 50 per cent of students in some of these schools suffer severe problems with numeracy and literacy.
The report, prepared for the department's own chief inspector, Eamonn Stack, argues for a more coherent approach towards disadvantage.Efforts to combat disadvantage are expected to dominate the INTO conference which began in Galway last night.
The department's own report on disadvantage, prepared over a two-year period, was scathing about the current programmes on educational disadvantage.
It points out that the response to the problem, which has seen the creation of dozens of various schemes, needs "rationalisation and coherence". It said the programmes were flawed in several respects including: