Ulster Unionist Education Spokesperson Rosemary Barton MLA has said the refusal by the Education Authority to approve over 630 school budgets illustrates the scale of the funding crisis in the local education system.  

Rosemary Barton said:

“I have been forwarded the emails that the EA sent to several schools on Tuesday and to say there is a sense of anger and bewilderment from those principals would be an understatement.

“The problems in our local education system continue to grow by the day. Class sizes continue to swell, subjects are being cut, buildings are becoming increasingly run-down and shortfalls in school budgets now increase year-on-year. 

“The frightening thing is that many of these schools have exhausted all reasonable cost reducing measures. Our local education system faces annual increases in pay costs of approximately £60m and this has largely been passed on to school budgets in the previous three financial years. The subsequent impact has been schools experiencing major deficits in their annual budgets.

“The current situation is untenable. The DUP/Conservative money which was supposedly secured to help address some of these immediate pressures still looks as far away as ever, with even some DUP representatives downplaying what the level of funding for our schools will be.

“We need an urgent review of wider education funding as it is clear that the current model is increasingly not fit for purpose. For instance, schools in Northern Ireland only receive 59% of the actual education budget, far behind the levels of other UK regions, with the rest increasingly being consumed by a swathe of growing administrative bodies such as the Education Authority. In financially difficult times such as these we must remember where the spending priorities should rest.”