The education minister has made “an almighty mess” of introducing a single Education and Skills Authority (ESA) for Northern Ireland, according to NI Conservatives’ spokesman, Mark Brotherston. Yesterday, John O’Dowd told a Stormont committee that he had ordered his department to stop work on the body, which has already cost the taxpayer £17 million.
“Originally ESA was supposed to replace the five Education and Library Boards currently governing education with a single body, which would have been cheaper and more efficient”, Mark explained. “Under John O’Dowd and his predecessor, Catriona Ruane, the proposed body became a complicated, expensive bureaucracy, designed to take decision-making away from schools and parents. That’s why ESA, under Sinn Féin’s influence, became hugely controversial and why £17 million has effectively been wasted.”
“It’s a scandal that Sinn Féin allowed plans to simplify the structures for governing education to balloon into proposals to create one of the biggest quangoes in Europe. It’s a scandal that the minister’s divisive, authoritarian approach now means that ESA is more or less dead in the water. Most of all, it’s a scandal that tax-payers’ money has been wasted, hand over fist, to pursue John O’Dowd’s doomed scheme. The shambles over ESA is yet another piece of evidence that the minister does not act in the best interests of schools or children and should resign from his position immediately.”