Debate contribution: Budget (No. 2) Bill: Second Stage

Debate contribution by Mr Nick Mathison on 9 June 2025.

MLA

Mr Nick Mathison

Party at the time

Alliance Party

Date

9 June 2025

Type

Debate contribution

Business

Question for Urgent Oral Answer

Heading

Budget (No. 2) Bill: Second Stage

Assembly identifier

Official Report component 4997702

Read the official Assembly record

Text

As Chair of the Education Committee, I will speak on behalf of the Committee in the first instance. The Committee was comprehensively briefed on this year's resource budget by officials on 7 May and had a briefing on the capital budget in March. Along with other Committee Chairs, I have spoken extensively on the 2025-26 Budget in recent debates, the most recent of which was last week's debate on the Supply resolution for the Main Estimates. I will therefore set out only briefly the financial position that the Budget represents for the Department of Education. The Department has received just over £3·2 billion in non-ring-fenced resource and £391 million in capital. Despite that representing an improved budgetary position from last year, officials continue to report inescapable pressures in excess of £300 million in resource spending and £83 million in capital spending affecting the Department. I will not rehearse the areas of pressure in detail again today, suffice it to say that it will undoubtedly be schools and the Education Authority (EA) that will feel the pressures most acutely in day-to-day spend. The most up-to-date school budget deficit figure sits at £180 million. That is a staggeringly high figure that, unfortunately, has been going in the wrong direction for many years. As the budget comes under more and more pressure, it is, in the main, schools that struggle to balance the books and deliver basic statutory services to our children. Regrettably, the Committee fully anticipates future departmental updates to continue to present that crisis picture for school budgets in the year ahead. While that adds substantial pressure on teachers and principals who work in the system, ultimately, it is children and young people who will lose out. That £300 million in resource pressures should not be referenced lightly, and the Committee certainly does not take it lightly. If the EA were required to find savings of that value, the impact on front-line service delivery and education could be devastating. Special educational needs (SEN) pupil support services; school transport services; catering services; specialist education supports; our youth services; and routine school building maintenance — those are just some of the direct front-line areas where the impact will, undoubtedly, be felt. The Committee will continue to monitor closely the savings and efficiencies that the EA is being asked to make and to prioritise the delivery of work to support SEN learners and SEN transformation and to invest in early years, childcare and measures to tackle educational disadvantage, as those are key strategic priority areas on which the Committee continues to focus. The challenge to deliver meaningfully on the priorities that the Committee has identified is significant, given that the Budget that is being presented makes delivering basic statutory services difficult, but that is the funding picture that we are looking at across the Departments. The Committee will continue to scrutinise all aspects of the Minister's spending plans and delivery in the year ahead, particularly after the comprehensive spending review. While it recognises the undoubted pressures, the Committee will expect to see evidence of the Department delivering efficiencies where possible while still delivering for children and young people as a priority. I will make a few closing remarks in my capacity as an Alliance education spokesperson. A Budget position that presents such a level of pressure on all Departments, including Education, is not where any Member wants to be. However, it is clear that — Members have referenced this — the position that we saw last year, with Barnett consequentials flowing into Departments, is not likely to be repeated. Departments across the board have to make difficult decisions in order to live within their means. We are voting to give legal authority for significant sums of money to be spent across our Departments, but that should not obscure the pressure that they are feeling. It is in that context that I again call on the Education Minister to set out a clear vision of transformation for education. We cannot continue to maintain a cumbersome, bureaucratic, divided and complex education system and not expect those pressures to be exacerbated every year. I am concerned that the budget is often directed at just keeping the system running without questioning whether that system delivers effective services for our children and young people. We are a year and a half on from the report of the independent review of education, but I have yet to see any real appetite for some of the structural reform that is needed. I will highlight the three key areas of work that, as far as I can see, the Minister and Department need to take seriously. First, we need to take a strategic look at our school estate. We have too many schools, and the schools that we have are often in the wrong places. That creates additional costs in maintaining and delivering the system and in delivering an effective school transport system. Clear steps are needed to establish an independent area planning commission on the long-term direction of travel in order to rightsize our school estate so that we can effectively deliver prudent spending on education that meets the needs of our children and young people effectively rather than unquestioningly accepting that the school estate that we have is the one that we must work with. If we do not start to have those conversations, we will not make the progress that we need to see. There is too much duplication in the system. Our schools compete with our further education colleges and with one another, chasing pupil funding across school sectors and types. We desperately need an effective 14-19 strategy and an ambition to reform the outdated practice of academic selection in order to deliver a sustainable and fit-for-purpose education system that works collaboratively, not competitively. The fact that conversations are difficult, as those undoubtedly are, does not mean that we should not have them. I hope that the Minister will show leadership in that regard in what is left of the mandate and in the incoming financial year. Finally, we need to reduce bureaucracy, not add to it. As far as I can tell, the most significant intervention that the Minister has outlined in progressing the report of the independent review of education is setting up a managing authority for controlled schools. In the budgetary position in which we find ourselves, I do not see how the case can be made for another arm's-length body. We need to move towards a single managing authority and the efficiencies that were promised in the establishment of the EA but have yet to be delivered. Leadership and ambition are needed if we are to see change in education. Change is undoubtedly required. The Budget creates massive challenges for our schools. It creates huge challenges and pressures on the effective delivery of a SEN delivery and transformation plan and of investment in education more broadly. Many Members have highlighted the fact that the introduction — we hope — of multi-year Budgets could play a key part in enabling some of that transformative planning to be brought forward, but that planning and those multi-year Budgets need to be informed by a genuinely transformative agenda. We cannot just do more of the same but with multi-year Budgets. We need an ambition for something better. If we want to move beyond the cycle of cuts and last-minute rescue plans in monitoring rounds in Education, it is time to start serious conversations about the long-term structural reform of our system.

1,253 words. Text as published by the Northern Ireland Assembly.

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Assessed 21 October 2026 at 12:47 UTC by jev-1.13.0 (requested as typesafe/jev) under rubric 2026.10-r9, methodology 1.9.

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