South Antrim Ulster Unionist MP Danny Kinahan has said that a priority for a new Executive and a new Minister of Education must be to sort out the budget crisis which schools have been plunged into for 2016/2017.

Mr Kinahan said:

“Whoever becomes Minister for Education in the DUP/ Sinn Fein Stormont Executive, the first priority must be to address the crisis in the Aggregated Schools Budget (ASB).  This is a legacy of the 2016/17 budget agreed in January by the DUP and Sinn Féin.   We warned at the time about the lack of protection for the funding which goes directly to schools.  Since then, with the decision of the outgoing Education Minister that schools themselves would have to absorb increases in teacher salary, pension contributions and national insurance contributions, schools have been plunged into financial difficulties.

“I have met with many School Principals in my South Antrim constituency and there is no doubt they are facing a real financial crisis in their schools. The mixture of superannuation costs, pay rises, national insurance rises and inflationary increases means schools are looking at cuts to their budgets of some 8%.  This is a direct consequence of decisions taken by the Minister of Education, and the budget which he welcomed in January.

“The ASB cuts came completely out of the blue giving Head Teachers and Boards of Governors no time to prepare for them, especially as schools are expected to come up with three-year budgets, when they have no idea of how much the Department is going to give them from one year to another.

“It is shocking to hear that schools are using the funds raised by their Parent Associations to help fund teaching when such routine matters should come from the Educational Authority, instead of providing those little extras that those parents expect their voluntary contributions to be spent on. I have been told of one school putting in as much as £5000 a year from its Parent Association funds into helping the school manage its day to day work.

“The funding situation is even worse when you consider that it has already been announced that £15M out of £20M extra for Education is to be released to the Aggregated Schools Budget in the upcoming June monitoring round.  There does not seem to be much budgetary flexibility available to the incoming Minister. However, it is clear that something must be done quickly.

“The Executive must reassess the whole budgetary set up in the Department of Education.  In the short term, funding must be moved between budget lines to address the schools budget crisis.  In the longer term, the whole budgetary system used by the Department of Education needs to be radically overhauled. Far too much of the budget is held in central administration, and far too little is devolved to individual schools.  The waste which the Ulster Unionist Party has highlighted over the past mandate must not be allowed to continue.”