Almost £50 million in unspent cash is being hoarded by the north's schools, new figures reveal.
Numerous individual primary and post-primary schools left hundreds of thousands of pounds unspent at the end of the last financial year.
At a time when cuts to public spending means there is not enough money in education for vital initiatives, three in every four primary schools have a budget surplus.
Casualties in education in recent years include a multi-million pound drive to improve the reading, writing and counting skills of the 'poorest' pupils, which has been wound up.
A cash fund to help schools tackle obesity and dental decay among children was also wiped out while the Primary Modern Languages Programme, providing Spanish, Irish and Polish classes for primary school children was scrapped.
The smallest surplus was just £93 while five schools saved more than £300,000 each.
Education minister John O'Dowd has previously warned schools that they should be spending, not saving, their annual budgets.
Some school leaders have admitted being uncomfortable with managing finances, and therefore those for whom monthly returns are showing to be on track or above allow things to roll over to the end of March.
Others monitor the situation closely, amid fears that the minister might adopt a 'use it or lose it' approach.
The latest school-by-school breakdown was published in response to an assembly question by the SDLP's John Dallat, a member of the cross-party Public Accounts Committee.
It shows that of the north's 814 primary schools, 617 ended 2014/15 with a budget surplus.
Christ the Redeemer in Lagmore, which received an annual budget of £1.8 million, ended the year more than £375,000 in the black. St Patrick's PS in Armagh, which had a budget of £1.2m, ended with a surplus of about £342,000. Grange Park PS in Bangor's surplus was £310,000 while Holy Trinity PS and St Kevin's PS, both, in Belfast, also had more than £300,000 unspent at the end of the 2014/15 financial year.
The combined primary school surplus was £33,294,944 while a further £15,219,443 was not spent across the post-primary sector.
Some individual surpluses among post-primaries were significantly higher than the top primary schools - they included Dromore High (£696,708), Sacred Heart College in Omagh (647,558) and St Patrick's College in Dungannon (£641,181).
St Patrick's had the largest surplus for the previous two years - with £815,620 in 2013/14, up from £801,996 the March before.
For the second year in a row, St Colm's High School in Twinbrook had a surplus of more than half a million pounds - this time the figure was £608,420.
Data is not available for voluntary grammar and grant-maintained integrated schools, for which the Department of Education is the funding authority.
