Work in Progress - Effectiveness of education programmes

In December 2023, the Department provided an update on the recommendations from the PAC’s Closing the Gap report (published in February 2022). The information provided by the Department outlined the following ten programmes, highlighting their role in tackling educational disadvantage in Northern Ireland: 

• Targeting Social Need (TSN)
• Sure Start
• Extended Schools Programme
• Full Service Programmes
• WRAP Programme
• Education Transformation Programme
• SEND Strategic Development Programme
• Reducing Educational Disadvantage (RED) Programme
• Count Read Succeed Strategy
• Collaborative Test and Learn Programme

At the request of the Public Accounts Committee, the NIAO are undertaking a report to determine whether the named education programmes can be shown to demonstrate value for money. 

Following our initial research, it was determined that the report would focus on the first seven programmes. The final three will not be considered as part of the report for the following reasons. Count, Read, Succeed is an overarching strategy with no funding allocated; Reducing Educational Disadvantage (RED) is now RaISE, and receives shared island funding; the Collaborative Test and Learn Programme is not a Department of Education-led programme, but a cross departmental one. We may consider these in future work.

The focus of the report will be an assessment of how the Department establishes, assesses and assures itself that the programmes are delivering value for money, and achieving the objectives and outcomes planned.

We plan to publish this report in Autumn 2025.