Experts question plans for schools’ funding

THE method of choosing schools for inclusion in support programmes to counter disadvantage has been questioned by the experts who help the Department of Education make its selections.

In a paper published in the most recent Journal of Irish Education, the Educational Research Centre (ERC) at St Patrick’s College in Dublin examined the links between pupils’ socio-economic circumstances, their gender and their achievement at school.

While they found evidence to support continuing the policy of identifying and targeting schools with concentrations of disadvantage, authors Nick Sofroniou, Peter Archer and Susan Weir suggested alternative ways of targeting those schools.