AQW 4438/22-27


Ms Connie Egan
Alliance Party
North Down


Tabled Date: 11/10/2022
Answered On Date: 17/10/2022
Priority Written: Yes


Question:
To ask the Minister of Education to outline the impact that the lack of an Executive is having on the Education sector, including what planned work that her Department has had to put on hold due to budgetary uncertainty.


Answer:
Education is facing extensive unavoidable cost pressures and rising service demands associated with delivering statutory and policy obligations.
In advance of a Final Budget being agreed by a new Executive, I have made a number of 2022-23 risk-based expenditure planning decisions to ensure minimal impact on children and young people. This includes maintaining the Aggregated Schools Budget at the same level as in 2021-22, providing funding to continue the Healthy Happy Minds pilot and Engage II programme until December 2022, extending the School Holiday Food Grant payments to cover the full financial year, and the funding of a number of other time sensitive critical areas.
My Department started the year with inescapable or pre-committed pressures estimated at a minimum of c£409m against the Department of Finance advised indicative baseline, and this figure has now risen to c£530m (of which c£122m relates to Special Educational Needs). Even against the Finance Minister’s 2022-25 Draft Budget proposals, the Department is heading towards a very significant overspend of up c£370m. This means that it will be extremely challenging to implement a range of things, including the education actions in the Northern Ireland COVID Recovery Plan and any recommendations that will emanate from the Independent Review of Education.
My Department is extremely restricted in its ability to reprioritise or reduce spend due to the vast majority of its budget being required to address statutory and demand led obligations, and indeed about 80% of the total Education budget is subsumed by staff costs.
Whilst work is ongoing to identify programmes of spend that could be scaled back or stopped, this will be very limited; and obviously any reduction in spend would invariably require cuts to essential frontline services that support the most vulnerable within our society, as well as risking breaching statutory obligations.
My hope would be that a new Executive will re-consider the Finance Minister’s previous 2022-25 Draft Budget proposals, with the aim of agreeing a multi-year budget in due course.