To ask the Minister of Education for an update on his Department’s plan to introduce a more agile and responsive Area Planning process.

Area Planning is not a static process. My Department continually works to make Area Planning agile and responsive to the needs of children and young people in education for example

‘Resetting’ is a process to allow those schools with consistent admission and enrolment numbers below their approved numbers to be reset to a more realistic level. During exercises in 2020 and 2021, 5242 unneeded available places were removed from the system. My Department will consider running this exercise again in 2026/27 in advance of the next Strategic Area Plan.

‘Normalisation’ is a process for primary and post primary schools who have consistently exceeded their approved admission and enrolment numbers to have their approved numbers normalised without the need for a Development Proposal (DP). My Department is operating a pilot exercise to test this process and is currently finalising this to determine how it can be taken forward in area planning.

The collective impact of these initiatives will give an effective assessment of the supply of and demand for school places in an area.

Given the urgent need to address the increasing demand for Special Educational Needs provision, my Department has worked with the Education Authority, to develop a new process which facilitates the establishment, closure or change of Specialist Provision at (sustainable) mainstream schools in an agile, efficient and expedient manner without the requirement for a DP. Work is also ongoing to consider if this arrangement can be extended to special school provision.

The ‘Additional Places’ exercise has aided the Schools Admission Process for the post primary transfer for Year 8s where there is not always sufficient number of places in some areas. An exercise for 2023-25 has provided 267 additional Year 8 places allocated to a number of schools to ensure the admissions processes could be concluded on time and the number of children still to be placed at the conclusion of the admission processes.