* Living in an urban or rural area of concentrated disadvantage and social exclusion
To meet this indicator, you must live in an area in which there is concentrated disadvantage – in other words, an area where, for example, there is high unemployment and poverty and very few facilities for the community.
Rationale for using ‘Disadvantaged Area’ as an indicator:
There is international evidence that living in a disadvantaged area has a negative influence on the life-chances of people who live there. Living in a disadvantaged neighbourhood is thought to increase the chance of unemployment, of a poor and unfinished education, of criminal behaviour, of an anti-social way of behaving, and of a lack of connection to what is going on in mainstream-society.HEAR colleges and universities are particularly interested in how living in a disadvantaged area can affect educational attainment and progression to higher education.
What is the Deprivation Index & Geo-coding?
Researchers have developed a ‘deprivation index’ which looks at affluence and deprivation in different parts of the Republic of Ireland and assigns a score depending on whether an area is defined as very affluent, extremely disadvantaged or somewhere in between. When you apply to HEAR, your address is checked against the index and you are given a score that indicates how disadvantaged your neighbourhood is.