Danny Kinahan MLA, Ulster Unionist Party spokesperson on education, has said that the UK Government financial package to Northern Ireland, arising out of the Stormont House talks, will not help to solve the present budgetary crisis facing schools in Northern Ireland.
Mr. Kinahan MLA said:
“Arising out of the Stormont House talks, up to £500 million has been promised over 10 years for new capital funding to support shared and integrated education. This is all well and good, but it does not in any way address the clear and present danger to schools' budgets, which are current facing 7% cuts.
“The threat to cut 7% of the Aggregated Schools Budget (ASB) is completely unacceptable. It is alarming that the ASB funding- which is delegated to schools- is proposed to be reduced by £78.7m in 2015/16. That is slightly offset by an allocation of £10m for an inescapable pressure. Nonetheless, I believe reducing the ASB by over £68m in a single year would be undeliverable- without having a major and detrimental impact on the provision of frontline education.
“I am well aware from speaking to local school Principals that these cuts, if implemented, would mean mass teacher redundancies, larger class numbers, less special needs provision and a poorer quality learning environment in general.
“One Principal of a school with 55 staff has told me that for him to meet budget targets by 2016/17 he would have to lose 15 teachers. The suggestion that these cuts to teaching staff are implemented on 1st April 2015, 3 months before the end of the academic year is absurd, and has caused anger and disbelief amongst the teaching fraternity. Schools would find it all but impossible to meet the Entitlement Framework expectations, and class sizes of 30 -35+ would be the norm. The statutory requirement on all post-primary schools regarding the Entitlement Framework will simply be no longer deliverable under the financial restrictions proposed.
“Whilst many of the cuts are being passed to the Aggregated Schools Budget, only 59% of the Education Budget is allocated directly to schools. We believe greater efficiency savings should be made from the remaining 41%. The priority of the Department should be to reduce the cuts to the schools budget as far as possible, and in this context, promises to spend hundreds of thousands of pounds of public money on new capital projects are extremely hard to justify.”