Education budget ‘lacks detail’
The Assembly’s Education Committee is unhappy with the lack of detail from the Department of Education regarding its spending plans, which will make new builds unlikely.
Officials from the Department of Education did not provide a breakdown of the Education Minister’s spending proposals to the Education Committee because that could be “misleading”.
The draft Budget says there will be “inescapable cost pressures associated with pay increases, price inflation, meeting statutory and contractual commitments and addressing demographic impacts.” These “inescapable pressures” are expected to account for a resource spending shortfall (which will be £303 million by 2014-2015). The committee had asked the department for a detailed breakdown of how the pressures will affect each of the four years. Instead, the department said it was “not possible to reflect the out-workings of these changes”.
The spending plans propose drawing down £10 million per annum from the Invest to Save Fund to pay for redundancies. The committee requested the department’s forecast estimates and planning assumptions of the savings that would be generated from reducing posts over each of the four years of this budget period, but none was given. Officials told the committee that £25 million is available in 2010-2011 for a voluntary severance programme and suggested that a £10 million would equate to 200 job losses. The committee asked why the department had not looked for savings from the 11,200 non-teaching and non- permanent staff in the sector.
A reduction of £41 million from the capital budget to pay for salaries and school running costs was questioned by some committee members and praised by others who agreed with the reasoning that it would protect jobs and frontline services.
The extension of free school meal entitlement, which is estimated to cost £21.8 million in 2011-2012 and approximately £31 million per annum for the other three years of the Budget period, was praised by some members for helping low income families. Others were concerned that the extension of free meals had not been done in the rest of the UK and, if demand exceeded the expected threshold of 10,000, costs would increase.
On the proposed savings listed in the plans, such as cutting £60 million from arm’s length bodies and £105 million off professional support for schools over the next four years, members asked how these would be delivered, particularly because the department didn’t provide evidence of plans, consultations, or timescales.
The fact that the aggregated schools budget outlines cuts of £179.8 million in 2014-2015 (nearly one-fifth of the total) worried the committee, particularly since the Minister has stressed in her recent letters that her key priority is to protect front line services “as far as possible”.
In addition, new builds are increasingly unlikely. The committee was told that there has not been any detailed timescale or plans for “putting in place plans across the education sector to reshape the schools provisions through rationalisation and restructuring.”
Views collected from various education bodies at a stakeholder event organised by the committee were put to the department. The Association of Chief Executives of Education and Library Boards said that bureaucracy surrounding special needs had to be done away with. “If a child requires visual aids, they require visual aids,” the organisation told the MLAs. “You don’t need educational psychologists and other practitioners to tell you that, yet you have to go through a 28-week period, spend £2,500 perhaps, to make available a resource of £500.”
The Association of School and College Leaders, which speaks on behalf of secondary school and college teachers, said that redundancy payments can place a burden on school budgets.
ICTU told the committee that the draft Budget “lacks clarity in how the strategic priorities in education can be achieved. There’s an absence of a workforce planning for schools for both teaching and non-teaching staff.”
Caitríona Ruane has said: “My department provided detailed spending plans to the committee on 24 November 2010. My departmental officials have been at the committee regularly and I have also been at the committee.”
