We are in the midst of an artificial financial crisis, so an air of unreality hung over the meeting of the Education Authority (EA) board this Tuesday to consider savings of £200 million.
The Northern Ireland Office has engineered an £800 million shortfall in Stormont’s budget, knowing the Treasury will magically find a similar sum in the Autumn – £1 billion has been reported – to cover the DUP’s retreat back to work. Drastic cuts can almost certainly be avoided if everyone holds their nerve for the next few months.
However, that should not distract from the real problems of waste and inefficiency at the EA. Major savings could still be made and education funding put to much better use.
The EA itself is a monument to bureaucratic duplication. It was set up in 2015 to replace the five regional education boards, under the same reform process that created the super-councils.
As with the super-councils, the promised savings were an illusion. Instead of merging a layer of administration into a streamlined new body, the EA simply became another layer – the management and structures of the five boards remained within it, with more added on top.
While the old boards at least offered some local devolution, the EA is responsible for all the schools in Northern Ireland and is mainly answerable to the Department for Education, whose main responsibility is all the schools in Northern Ireland. It is as if the 2015 reforms created one super-duper-council and kept Stormont.
The Department for Health was in a similar position with the Health and Social Care Board, the arms-length body responsible for most healthcare in Northern Ireland, created in 2009 by merging four regional boards. So the department eliminated the duplication by absorbing the board into itself, a task it completed last year.
The EA claims to spend only 1 per cent of the education budget on central administration, equivalent to about £25 million, so it might seem there is little to be saved by absorbing it into the Department of Education. That overlooks the larger cost of policies getting lost between layers of government.
For example, the EA and the department have been consistently unable to show value for money for billions of pounds of special needs funding over the past decade.
In 2021, the Audit Office examined two schemes to improve the educational attainment of pupils from socially disadvantaged backgrounds, costing £100 million a year. It could find no evidence they were having any impact. Perhaps these schemes do work and the problem is measuring results, but an obstructed flow of information still leads to costly mistakes.
A parliamentary inquiry in 2017 heard claims of a slightly different issue with duplication. The EA was accused of justifying its superfluous existence by hogging funds and decision-making powers, instead of delegating them to schools. This defensive over-centralisation might be wasting up to 5 per cent of the education budget, or £125 million a year.
Even if the EA were functioning as intended there would be good reasons for departmental absorption, but there are concerns it checked out during the pandemic and has barely checked back in.
The EA was 19 months late submitting its 2019/2020 accounts and 13 months late submitting its 2020/21 accounts, which were incomplete and have still not been audited. There is no sign of last year’s accounts. The Audit Office dismissed EA’s explanation of pandemic staffing issues, noting it could find only one person to speak to during “most of the audit period” for the 2019/2020 accounts. This is an extraordinary situation.
The cuts considered at Tuesday’s meeting were proposed by EA management. The board is a different set of individuals, bringing its own set of ironies to the discussion.
Its 20 members include eight political nominees: three from Sinn Fein, two each from the DUP and Alliance and one from the UUP. Naturally, they will refuse to approve cuts while pointing fingers at each other. Most of the remaining members represent our multitude of school sectors and the Church bodies on whose behalf we expensively segregate our children. They will resist any savings on that score.
While segregation is a much larger issue than administrative reform, absorbing the EA into the Department of Education would loosen religious influence. The Churches would remain stakeholders in the system if the board were abolished, while politicians could hold officials and ministers to account in the assembly.
Alas, a fake budget crisis will bring none of these matters to a head.
