Sir, – The article "ESRI: Scheme for needy schools should focus on urban areas" (April 9th) describes some of the conclusions drawn by the ESRI in their recent review of previous evaluations of the Deis programme. The opening sentence states that "An ESRI report into supports for disadvantaged schools suggests that they should be rebalanced in favour of urban recipients as rural ones are already outperforming the national average".
However, this conclusion is based on the results of the performance of a very small sample of seven of the existing 321 Deis rural schools that happened to be included in the 2014 National Assessments of English Reading and Mathematics.
During the formal independent evaluation of Deis by the Educational Research Centre, test data collected from 259 Deis rural schools revealed that they had reading and mathematics achievements that were below the national average.
The 2014 National Assessments, unlike the Deis evaluation, were not designed to gauge the impact of Deis, but rather to monitor reading and mathematics standards in a cross-section of schools over time. Indeed, the national assessments report by my colleagues at the Educational Research Centre suggested that the findings relating to Deis status “should be considered in conjunction with the outcomes of other studies of performance in Deis schools that are based on considerably larger sample sizes, and provide more accurate and stable estimates of achievement”.
In light of these considerations, it would seem most unwise to base any recommendations regarding “rebalancing” of resources on these data. In the meantime, it may be of interest to note that colleagues and I at the Educational Research Centre have begun using data from both studies to investigate the relative contributions of Deis and non-Deis pupils to the overall improvements in reading and mathematics observed in the 2014 national assessments. – Yours, etc,
Dr SUSAN WEIR,
Educational Research
Centre,
Drumcondra,
Dublin 9 .