As teachers and school leaders across these islands have received hard-won pay increases, the teaching profession in Northern Ireland has endured total pay paralysis for well over three years, resulting in a bitter industrial dispute that has seen an unprecedented level of strikes and other industrial actions.
The magnitude of the pay dispute represents the culmination of frustration and anger about the damage inflicted by austerity policies and repeated failures of devolved government in Northern Ireland. The erosion and degradation of funding, resource and support have brought about devastating impacts at school level and very stark reductions of services for children and young people, particularly, and disproportionately, our most vulnerable children.
The developing movements this week towards restoring the Stormont government are welcomed by the membership of NAHT, but we are very clear that the gravely serious body of work that lies ahead requires a sense of urgency that has, in recent years, been sadly absent.
Education priorities in Northern Ireland
1. Teacher pay
Before an incoming executive can begin any kind of work in education, the industrial obstacles that exist need to be fairly and sustainably resolved. This can, helpfully, happen very quickly. The teaching unions, Department of Education and employing authorities have maintained positive engagement despite the political stalemate and absence of funding. It is possible, therefore, that positive negotiations can be opened as soon as the funding is released and a minister is in place.
2. Workload
A previous decade-long industrial dispute resulted in agreement around a series of workforce reviews to explore and set recommendations on workload and working conditions. Following very extensive and collaborative work between trade union and management side representatives, the reviews have been completed and recommendations for improvements have been established, crucially, with the agreement of all parties.
The workforce has not, however, seen any meaningful or tangible evidence of delivery of the recommendations, however, which represents a further industrial barrier to progress. For example, school leaders are extremely frustrated and agitated that the much-anticipated Review of Workload Impact on School Leaders has not yet delivered any noticeable improvement to their workload (NAHT research suggests that school leaders in Northern Ireland operate, on average, a 54-hour working week).
3. Special needs
A series of well-publicised reviews have confirmed what school leaders have been saying for some years: provision for children with additional needs in Northern Ireland is in absolute crisis (see, for example, the 2023 Independent Review of Special Educational Needs Services and Processes). Frankly, special education needs provision is wholly underfunded.
In the special sector - which is short of places by well over 1,000 - chronic overcrowding has meant that every single special school has lost specialist rooms to convert them to classroom space. Therapy rooms, sensory rooms, libraries, safe spaces, even staffrooms have been repurposed as learning spaces, and special schools are operating under immense pressure in buildings that are inadequate to meet the needs of their enrolment profiles.
Given this crisis, children with complex needs are being allocated places in mainstream settings with inadequate support and inadequate staffing, leaving children floundering and, sadly and destructively, parents and schools in conflict because both are grappling around trying to fight the system for support. Quite often these mainstream places are allocated against the principal’s and governors’ clearly expressed concerns for the safe provision for the child.
The system has attempted to mitigate this crisis by developing special units within mainstream settings. However, these remain extremely problematic, with practitioners expressing serious concerns about the impact of the arrangements.
With wholly inadequate specialist input available, mainstream schools are left to muddle through these issues. There are huge numbers of parent complaints across our system in relation to special educational needs provision, as well as huge numbers of tribunals and enormous disharmony between the parents and the lead professionals delivering education on the front line.
4. School budgets
Hundreds of millions of pounds have been withdrawn from Northern Ireland’s frontline education services over the past decade. The effects of this have been devastating: well over half of our schools are operating in deficit financial positions, which is wholly unsustainable.
The basic services for our children, particularly our most vulnerable children, have been decimated. Indeed, education cuts have been more severe to children in Northern Ireland than anywhere else on these islands.
The totality of the education funding shortfall is unclear, but it is expected to be in excess of three-quarters of a billion pounds, not accounting for the many hundreds of millions of pounds that need to be restored to basic school funding allocations or the £300 million maintenance and school estate black hole.
The current funding arrangements cause further injury to many of our schools. Although successive government ministers have accepted the need for a genuine review of the common funding formula, which is the medium through which basic funding is distributed across schools, not one has shown any genuine desire to take it on. This unacceptable and undertaking such a review is a must for any incoming government.
No longer can our schools accept such an outdated and blunt instrument to determine funding arrangements and, therefore, the capacity to provide learning, teaching and safeguarding. An incoming executive must prioritise the immediate restoration of school funding and an urgent review of the distribution of funding.
School leaders recognise that the level of degradation has been so significant and so sustained, the challenge for any incoming executive is severe. However, the workforce is ready to work with all parties to bring about improvements for our children and young people.
We stand by, therefore, in anticipation of political restoration, with expectation that the industrial and funding barriers will be removed to enable us to work together for the betterment of our children.
Dr Graham Gault is national secretary of school leaders’ body NAHT Northern Ireland
