DEIS Plan
In June 2022 Drimnagh Castle Primary was designated to be a DEIS school. DEIS stands for Delivering Equality of Opportunity in School and means that we were able to: appoint a Home School Community Liaison coordinator; avail of the free School Meals Programme; and access a range of supports such as the School Completion Programme. These have all been of huge benefit to our school and the boys over the past year.
As a school, we have been working on a DEIS Plan which is now being introduced this year. There are six areas to the plan: Attendance, Retention, Literacy, Numeracy, Transitions, and Partnership with Parents and Others.
The first step of this process was to gather information. We did this by sending out questionnaires to the parents and guardians, and asking the boys to complete questionnaires in school as well as organising focus groups with them. This allowed us to gain a valuable insight into how we are doing in each of the six areas at present, and to set targets for how we can improve in the future.
The Plan was presented to the Board of Management at the start of the year and is available to view here:
We have also developed a version of the plan which is accessible to the boys and which we have been sharing with them at whole-school assemblies over the past few weeks. As the boys are at the centre of all we do in The Castle, this part of the process was particularly important to us. The boys’ version of the plan is also available on our school website.
We now have definite targets in each of the six areas that we will be working on for the next year, and actions for how we plan to achieve them. These targets will be reviewed in June 2024 and are part of a three-year plan for the development of the school.