Opinion

Newton Emerson: The issue in education and health is the high cost of bureaucracy

Newton Emerson

Newton Emerson

Newton Emerson writes a twice-weekly column for The Irish News and is a regular commentator on current affairs on radio and television.

Schools are facing cuts to their budgets
Schools are facing cuts to their budgets Schools are facing cuts to their budgets

Public spending per child in Northern Ireland’s schools is the lowest in the UK and a whopping 46 per cent lower than in Scotland, according to figures obtained by the Northern Ireland Commissioner for Children and Young People (NICCY).

The numbers are fascinating, if you have ever wondered what it would and should cost to put a child through education straight out of your own pocket.

In Northern Ireland, public spending is £5,009 per child per year - that’s the average right across pre-school, primary and secondary.

The figures for England, Wales and Scotland are £5,915, £6,565 and £7,305.

To NICCY, the Northern Ireland figure represents a “shortfall”. Its concern is that parents are being asked to make up the difference through ‘voluntary’ contributions, now averaging £1,222 per child per year.

The SDLP typified political reaction by calling the numbers “shocking” and urging Stormont to reconvene to plug the spending gap.

But the most interesting reaction came from Scope NI, the magazine of the Northern Ireland Council for Voluntary Action (Nicva).

While sympathising with NICCY’s concerns about the financial demands on parents, Scope noted that in terms of actual results “Northern Ireland holds up OK”. By contrast, all the extra money Scotland has poured into its schools has been accompanied by a disastrous fall in performance.

Scope then looked at the administrative overhead in education.

The figures above are for the money that reaches schools themselves.

The cost of running all the bureaucracies to allocate this money is an additional £2,468 per child per year in Northern Ireland - nearly half as a much again as the schools are spending.

Worse still, the comparable figures for England, Wales and Scotland are £1,184, £1,207 and £2,506. In other words, we are spending the same on administration per pupil as the spendthrift Scots and twice as much as everyone else.

“There are problems in education, and some of these require more funding to be solved - but that doesn’t mean we need extra money, just better spending,” Scope concluded.

This is a remarkable verdict from Scope and Nicva, bastions of ‘anti-austerity’ statism where turning down a taxpayer pound is normally unthinkable.

Credit where it is due - Scope took a deeper look at the numbers and did not shy away from what they revealed, which is a tale of impressive frontline efficiency and staggering back office waste.

In fact, the deeper you look, the worse this gets.

Northern Ireland has a well-known problem with duplication in education due to its unusual number of school sectors - state, Catholic, integrated, Irish medium and so on.

However, we have just merged all our education boards into a single Education Authority, supposedly to address this at administrative level.

Meanwhile, the outworking of duplication at school level - empty desks, surplus buildings etc - is being managed effectively by schools, despite being in theory the trickier and more expensive problem.

It should also be noted that staff costs make up the bulk of each school’s budget, schools cannot negotiate wages and with a reported 80 applicants per teaching job, wages are arguably far too high.

The countervailing argument is that more applicants leads to a higher standard of teaching, which is what gives us a better bang for our frontline buck. Nevertheless, schools are still successfully absorbing the cost.

There is little reason to believe it is a different story across the rest of the public sector, most notably in health. Is there any point in extra spending per patient until we address the centralisation, specialisation and other administrative reforms demanded again and again by 20 years of independent reports?

Ultimately, the question is who will address it.

This week, the top civil servant at the Department of Education warned of £100 million of “cost pressures” on Northern Ireland’s schools this year, which he identified as school staffing costs, special educational needs and essential building maintenance, plus a £24 million overall budget cut.

Naturally, the civil service will not point to the administrative overhead, although reducing that to English and Welsh levels would save a jaw-dropping £430 million a year. Nor need we place any hope in direct rule British ministers - they would just leave the civil servants in charge.

As the SDLP reaction shows, few of our elected politicians see back office cuts as the solution to front line pressures. They simply want more spending everywhere.

So who will ever reverse the accretion of public money towards the bureaucrats tasked with handing it out?

newton@irishnews.com