What do cuts in education look like?
Last week, in a co-ordinated development that would have done Machiavelli proud, the British government announced a string of funding cuts that will have deep and enduring implications for schools and for families of our poorest children.
In an email delivered to school leaders just after 10am on Thursday morning, it was announced that the Engage programme and Healthy Happy Minds initiative would both be ended.
Whilst the latter had been flagged up in advance and came as no surprise, the failure of the Department of Education to confirm extension of the Engage programme for the remaining three months of the academic year (April to June) was a cruel surprise, leaving school leaders in the invidious position of having to tell the teachers involved that their employment would be terminated the following day.
This was the third year of the Engage programme, set up post-Covid to help provide many schools with an additional teacher to work with underachieving pupils in both numeracy and literacy.
In both previous years, the NI Executive was able to announce extension funding for Engage teachers in March of 2021 and 2022 to see the programme through to the end of June.
Had the NI Executive been up and running again, there is no question but that the DUP and Sinn Féin would have prioritised this programme and found the money required as both have been extremely supportive of an initiative they conceived of and of which they know has made a difference.
Consequently, across our schools this week, children in desperate need of the additional tuition support to help avoid falling behind in their learning will no longer be supported during the school day through involvement in these invaluable teacher-led small group sessions.
They will simply fall further behind.
The confirmation that Healthy Happy Minds funding has ended will mean that the therapy and counselling sessions organised on a weekly basis for children suffering a variety of adverse childhood experiences will no longer take place.
The children will simply continue to suffer and be expected to carry on with their learning.
Simultaneously, news broke that 'Holiday Hunger' payments to families of our most deprived children were ending, just in time for the Easter break.
Meanwhile, the announcement of new annual school budgets that will represent a significant decrease on what was available to schools previously will dramatically impact upon staffing and resourcing arrangements in schools.
There have also been murmurings that the Extended Schools programme will either be ended or significantly reduced, something that will hit hardest on schools serving our most deprived communities.
Many schools, including my own, will run after-school programmes to pro-actively support children with dyslexia; nurture sessions are organised to help pupils with anxiety and other social/emotional concerns; remedial literacy and numeracy sessions will be organised in a targeted manner to help newcomer children and others throughout the school who may benefit most from small group sessions.
All of these programmes are in danger in the current environment.
Parents will be used to schools pro-actively seeking to help them every day by organising Breakfast and After School clubs which will now be threatened due to schools not being in a position to fund staffing arrangements.
The Education Authority is currently attempting to open scores of additional learning support units across mainstream schools. The additional bureaucratic burden for school leaders associated with opening, maintaining and co-ordinating these units for special educational needs pupils is considerable and is only getting worse.
Consequently, many school leaders will be forced to think twice and to even reject the offer to open such units due to being too stretched to manage the process at a time when schools will be forced to send special needs co-ordinators back into classrooms to teach, thereby reducing what can be done to support the needs of our most vulnerable children.
In a very real way, the education cuts announced over the past week will be most keenly felt by our most vulnerable and deprived children and the schools who serve them, a telling indictment of this British government and of those who continue to block the return of an Executive which would at least be better disposed towards prioritising and finding a way of meeting the needs of our children.
