Who is this template for?
This template is specifically designed for school leadership teams in Ireland operating under the DEIS (Delivering Equality of opportunity In Schools) programme. It provides a robust framework for the Principal, Deputy Principal, Board of Management, and teachers to collaboratively conduct a thorough self-evaluation and build a targeted, compliant action plan.
Why use this template?
This template transforms the DEIS action planning process from a compliance exercise into a powerful engine for school improvement. Drawing directly from the principles outlined in official Department of Education circulars, it provides a clear and logical structure for continuous development.
- Prioritise Action Across Core DEIS Themes: The abacus provides a clear structure to evaluate and prioritise efforts across the key DEIS themes. This ensures schools can strategically focus resources on the most critical areas for their students, whether it's improving literacy and numeracy outcomes, boosting attendance, or strengthening progression pathways.
- Strengthen Home-School Community Links: The framework mandates a collaborative approach, prompting schools to actively engage with their specific community. It formalises the process of consulting with parents, the Home School Community Liaison (HSCL) Coordinator, and the School Completion Programme, ensuring the final action plan is grounded in the lived reality of the students and their families.
- Drives Planning with DEIS-Specific Evidence: The iAbacus platform requires schools to move beyond general observations. You can directly attach evidence—such as standardised test scores, student attendance data, retention statistics, and parent feedback—to justify your judgements and shape the targets within your action plan.
- Integrates and Streamlines DEIS Reporting: For a DEIS school, this self-evaluation abacus effectively becomes your School Improvement Plan (SIP). This integration prevents duplication of work and streamlines the process of planning, monitoring, and reporting to the Department of Education and the Inspectorate, ensuring all efforts are unified under one cohesive strategy.
- Builds Capacity for Targeted Intervention: By using the framework year after year, school staff become more skilled at identifying the root causes of underachievement specific to their context. The abacus builds a shared professional language and analytical skill set focused on tackling educational disadvantage, leading to more sophisticated and effective interventions over time.
How does it work?
This template uses the intuitive iAbacus process to turn complex evaluation into a clear, visual, and collaborative exercise. Your team will make judgements against core DEIS themes, validate them against clear criteria, attach evidence, and analyse helping and hindering factors to create a focused action plan.
The evaluation is structured across the following key areas:
- Attendance
- Literacy
- Numeracy
- Examination attainment
- Educational progression
- Partnership with parents
- Partnership with other
Gaining Strategic Insight
A DEIS Inspector from the Department of Education can use the iAbacus 'Overlay' and 'Stack' features to aggregate the evaluation data from all DEIS schools within a region or across the country. This provides a powerful, macro-level view of the programme's effectiveness, allowing for comparison of different intervention strategies on themes like attendance or numeracy, and helping to identify which schools require more intensive support versus those demonstrating best practices that can be shared system-wide.
Clear, Professional Reporting
With a single click, you can generate a polished, professional PDF report of your entire DEIS self-evaluation and action plan. This report is ideal for presenting a clear and evidence-rich summary to the Department of Education's Inspectorate during a DEIS-themed inspection, or for sharing with your school's Board of Management for formal governance and progress review meetings.
References / Source Material
- DEIS Plan 2017
- Circular 0034/2023 - DEIS Action Planning
- Circular 0040/2016 (Post-Primary) and Circular 0039/2016 (Primary)
How to Get Started
New to iAbacus? Discover how this template can support your improvement strategy. Book a personalised demo or start a free trial to explore the full platform. Visitwww.iAbacus.comto learn more. Already a subscriber? You can find this template in the template library within your iAbacus account. Simply log in, create a new abacus, and select it from the list to get started.
