An initiative to tackle educational disadvantage will be launched by the Minister for Education next week.
The scheme will be announced in tandem with the National Development Plan and will mark a change in approach. It will shift the focus from designating schools as "disadvantaged" to targeting individual disadvantaged students in a range of schools.
The students will be supported with financial and staff resources, including extra home-school liason officers.
The secretary general of the Department of Education, Mr John Dennehy, told the Public Accounts Committee that the measures would respond "to the needs of disadvantaged children and disadvantaged schools, but with a huge emphasis on individual children".
It would be "a wide-ranging plan" which would be "linked closely to the National Development Plan due out next week". Mr Dennehy said the present method of nominating schools as being disadvantaged led to situations "where there's a tremendous anomaly between what one school is getting and what another school a few hundred yards down the road is getting".
The new scheme would "try and get rid of those kind of anomalies", but that didn't mean disadvantaged schools would lose their status.
The measures would be backed by the School Attendance Bill, currently making its way through the Houses of the Oireachtas. Mr Dennehy said it had "taken far too long to produce adequate schools attendance legislation."
The Bill placed an emphasis on welfare services for schools to ensure students didn't develop attendance problems or drop out. It would feature a tracking system for primary students, something which had been "sadly lacking". Developing a tracking system had been made much easier by the computerisation of primary schools and their connection to the Internet, Mr Dennehy said.
Non-attendance at schools had dropped "very, very considerably" because of the Breaking the Cycle initiative, which also tackles educational disadvantage. The Department was looking at "the best spin-offs" from that programme for its new initiative, he said.
In response to a question from Fine Gael's Mr Jim Mitchell, Mr Dennehy said plans to develop a campus of the Dublin Institute of Technology at Grangegorman were "very definitely active" and a proposal on the development was with the Department of Finance.
The Comptroller and Auditor General, Mr John Purcell, said universities should signal more clearly in their accounts the use to which they put monies raised from student levies. At present, students are charged almost £280 in capitation charges and many pay extra levies to their colleges for individual projects.
