Written evidence submitted by the National Association of Head Teachers (NAHT(NI)), relating to the funding and delivery of public services in Northern Ireland inquiry (FPC0011)

Summary

The NAHT’s evidence seeks to address two areas for the Committee’s consideration:
 

•                  The financial situation facing Northern Ireland’s education services and the consequences of budgetary pressures on the delivery of this area of public service.
•                  The impact of the lack of a functioning Executive on budgetary management and strategic decision-making across Northern Ireland departments.

NAHT

NAHT is an independent trade union and professional association with over 35,000 members in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. Members include principals, vice principals, assistant head teachers, senior leaders, bursars and school business managers. They hold leadership positions in early years, primary, special, post primary and independent schools, sixth form colleges, outdoor education centres, pupil referral units, social service establishments and other education settings. Thus, NAHT is in an excellent position to provide an informed practitioner position that covers the viewpoint of leaders across all phases of education.

Furthermore, NAHT has been at the forefront of campaigning for fairer funding for education in Northern Ireland. We have an acute understanding of the problems with the current funding arrangements and how they are impacting on children and young people’s lives, but also have a vision for what a better, fairer education system would look like.

The financial situation facing Northern Ireland’s education services, and the consequences of budgetary pressures on the delivery of this area of public service.

Cumulative pressures

In May 2018, the NAHT called for a school funding review following a decade of cumulative reductions in education funding and, more specifically, funding delivered directly to schools[1].

In November of the same year, the Education Authority’s own analysis of its financial position suggested that almost half of its schools were projecting a deficit for that financial year. Indeed, Northern Ireland’s most senior civil servant, David Sterling, said that the financial situation facing education required long-term planning and major transformation[2].

The financial context was producing strain well beyond system level, with individual schools showing major signs of strain, at that stage, being felt beyond the tangibly and visibly demonstrated at school level. Individual school leaders were, unusually, beginning to make their school’s financial circumstances public in an attempt to prompt investment in direct school funding. In well documented examples, one school principal told the Committee’s hearing into education funding in Northern Ireland, that he was forced to ask parents to donate basic materials, including tissues, soap and toilet roll because of his budget[3] while another implored parents to provide basic stationery items, including pencils and paper[4].

Remarkably, the situation significantly deteriorated further. Having managed the outbreak of Covid, education in Northern Ireland faced financial crisis. While the Education Authority was facing a £200m deficit, the Institute of Fiscal Studies revealed that Northern Ireland spends less on each child’s education than anywhere else in the UK[5].

Removal of Services

With a sense of disbelief, we note that the crisis has spiralled with the reality being that schools, and indeed, the wider system, are no longer able to shield children from the damaging impacts of this funding crisis. In the past few weeks alone, many programmes, including Engage (to provide support for children post-Covid lockdowns), Happy Healthy Minds (an initiative to support counselling of primary children) and holiday hunger support have been closed. Tragically, the Extended Schools Programme has been cut, removing the ability of schools in socially disadvantaged areas to provide vital support services such as counselling, breakfast and after-school clubs and speech and language services; a decision that was met with grave disappointment by students themselves[6]. Indeed, the funding provided by the Extended Schools Programme provided a certain amount of protection of disadvantaged children from the worst ravages of wider school underfunding felt by schools in less disadvantaged areas.

The school estate

The cumulative impact of the steady reduction in education funding over the last 13 years has been devastating. NAHT estimates that the outstanding school maintenance backlog in Northern Ireland could be close to, or over, half a billion pounds[7].

Special educational needs

While the crisis within SEN provision has been well documented[8], the ability of the Education Authority to resolve it is surely questionable, given its own financial deficit has now risen to £300m[9].

In mainstream schools, SEN provision is wholly underfunded, with almost non-existent training and capacity building. Children with complex needs are allocated places in mainstream settings with inadequate support and inadequate staffing, leaving children floundering and, destructively, parents and schools in conflict because both are having to fight the system for support.

The absence of adequate funding has hampered the referral and assessment processes for schools to such an extent that schools are having to make very consequential decisions about who in their school has the most pressing need to be prioritised for referral. NAHT contends that school-based practitioners do not have the training or expertise to make such decisions and the extremely inadequate allocations of assessment provisions to schools mean that children with perceived less-significant needs are often left unidentified.

Additionally, with inadequate specialist input available, schools are left to simply do their best. There are unquantifiable numbers of parental complaints across our system in relation to special educational needs provision; unquantifiable numbers of tribunals and enormous disharmony between parents and lead professionals delivering education on the front line. With the justifiable agenda to ensure that all children are placed in schools, there has been, unfortunately, an overt push to have all children enrolled in a setting – in some cases, any setting – with questionable regard for the appropriateness of that setting to the child’s identified needs. Children with complex additional needs have been placed in mainstream settings with minimal support, leaving schools relying unsustainably heavily on the goodwill of many individuals who are not adequately trained, resourced or paid. 

The special sector itself is short of capacity and unacceptably overcrowded. Indeed, to manage the capacity problem, every special school has made significant compromise to the geography of their buildings; the impact of this is that there is not a single special school in Northern Ireland that hasn’t been forced to lose specialist rooms, therapy rooms, sensory rooms, safe places, libraries and staffrooms.

The profession

Northern Ireland’s five teaching trade unions are all in industrial action as a result of cumulative pay erosion that equates to almost 30% in real terms since 2010. The action began in the form of action short of strike action in the latter half of 2022, but has escalated to a planned day of strike action on 26 April 2023. For the NAHT, this is unprecedented; never in the 126 years of NAHT history has there been strike action arising from a pay dispute. Unfortunately, the current dispute comes less than three years from the close of the last dispute, which sought to address a wide range of issues around workload and working conditions, linked, in several of the reviews, to the decline in support services, resources and funding both to schools and to the wider system (it should also be noted that the profession still awaits any tangible sign of delivery from the conclusion of the reviews secured in the 2020 Agreement)[10].

The impact of the lack of a functioning Executive on budgetary management and strategic decision-making across Northern Ireland departments.

No accountability, scrutiny or route of appeal

In the Pivotal briefing titled ‘Governing Northern Ireland Without an Executive’, the think tank identified that ‘the lack of proper government is very damaging, given the multitude of immediate and longer-term problems’[11]. It is hard to imagine that this damage could be demonstrably clearer in any area of public service than education. Without a Minister, there is no one to whom school leaders can appeal in relation to the rapid removal of services for our children, including those mentioned above. Likewise, there is no Ministerial accountability and no scrutiny. It is unconscionable that decisions that are so gravely impactful on thousands of children can be made without any degree of accountability beyond piecemeal media statements penned in a press office.

Industrial dispute

One of the reasons behind NAHT’s escalation from action short of strike action to strike action has been the total failure to provide any movement whatsoever. Without an Executive, a Minister and a budget, the profession has been left to languish in a state of industrial unrest that may take a generation to heal. The catastrophic failure of governance has, very regrettably, left the employing authorities and Department of Education impotent in terms of their capacity to broker an end to the dispute.

Beyond the critical urgency surrounding the current industrial unrest are other longstanding issues around working conditions that require Ministerial leadership including, but certainly not limited to, gender inequities (for example, the issue of nursery principal release), contractual inequities (for example, the triennial reviews in the special sector) and, of course, significant workload issues.

Funding

At times, pockets of short-term funding for programmes have been released, which have been welcomed and impactful. With the long-term funding for our schools’ core business in crisis, however, our school leaders seek a reliable, sustainable, deliverable, long-term funding plan that promotes and delivers stability and continuity of service across schools.

The common funding formula that is used to distribute funding across our school system is outdated, inadequate and must be urgently reviewed with a clear understanding of exactly what money is required to provide for the basic education for a child before any other funding criteria is applied. Furthermore, the deficit positions that the majority of our schools are now in (both as a result of funding reductions and the funding formula) need to be resolved to remove the debt noose that is now crippling educational provision across the country.

On 24 November 2022, the Rt Hon Chris Heaton-Harris, Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, set out a budget for 2022/23 in the absence of a Northern Ireland Executive. In his statement, he explained that, not only did “the former Executive fail to agree a budget, but the Ministers who remained in their posts during the six months from May to October 2022, left Northern Ireland’s public finances with a black hole of some £660m”[12].

Without Ministers in place in Northern Ireland, the NAHT wrote to the Secretary of State on 5 December 2022, requesting an urgent meeting to discuss the budget needs for the education sector in Northern Ireland. In his response, on 30 January 2023, the Rt Hon Heaton-Harris replied by pointing back to the Northern Ireland Executive and explained that “it is a matter for the NI Department of Education to make specific allocations within the budget total set for this department and we encourage you to raise any funding concerns directly with them”[13].

In reality, this correspondence demonstrates that practitioners in Northern Ireland have nowhere to turn; there is no government and, therefore, no accountable decision makers, decisions being made around the cuts in services are not consulted and the decision-making processes are inscrutable and made by unnamed policy makers and, sadly, the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, when approached, simply circles us back to the source of the problem.

This is no way to run an education system. Our children are suffering, our schools are in disarray, our practitioners are in desperate need of uplift and support, our school budgets are in crisis, and, crucially, we have no one to whom we can appeal.

We urge the Committee to directly meet with the NAHT and our school leader members as a key part of the work

We would welcome the opportunity to give evidence directly to the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee and would like NIAC members to meet with a cross-phase, cross-sector delegation of our membership to hear from practitioners the impact cuts are having on their daily reality. We would also like to invite members of the NIAC to meet with school principals, governors, parents, pupils and staff in their schools so that the challenges being faced at the chalkface can be seen first-hand. NAHT would be happy to facilitate a structured visit on behalf of the NIAC.

April 2023