Cutting further and higher education places could be avoided if the Executive “tackled segregation and duplication in schools, merged the teaching colleges and slashed back office bureaucracy”, according to Conservative Party spokesman, Johnny Andrews.
“It’s very obvious that the various Stormont ministers are now competing to present the most apocalyptic vision of how budget cuts will affect their departments”, Johnny commented. “However, we know that segregation in Northern Ireland costs the taxpayer up to £1 billion every single year. There would be no need to limit places in further and higher education, for instance, had the Executive made even a decent start to reducing that figure. The same could be said for many other cuts to services which we are told are in the offing.”
“In schools, for example, the waste involved in running a segregated system is staggering. Yet the Sinn Féin minister has prevented the integrated sector from growing, despite high demand and has done nothing to encourage shared education. It will be a scandal if young people aged 16 and upwards, who often attend institutions that are properly mixed, cannot enter further or higher education, as a result. In DEL itself, moves to merge our teaching colleges have been thwarted so far, and there is no reason why this should go ahead by 2018, as originally planned. If people in Northern Ireland are being asked to swallow cuts to front-line services, they have a right to see that there is a parallel effort to finally end the colossal costs of segregation.”