Education Authority announces price hike in school dinners

The EA says its cost saving measures will “inevitably have an adverse impact on services”

A 50p increase in the price of a set school meal for paying pupils in primary, nursery and special schools has been announced by the Education Authority.

The price hike, which will take effect from January, also include equivalent percentage increases for food items in school cafeterias for post primary schools. Pupils receiving free school meals will not be impacted and the EA says prices paid for school meals have not increased since 2017/18 and will remain “well below the cost of producing a meal”.

Announced today, Wednesday November 5, new costings have been deemed as “significant savings measures” by the Education Authority.

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A spokesperson said: “Education services in NI have faced growing and increasingly unsustainable budgetary shortfalls for a number of years. Living within allocated funding – whilst meeting rising service needs – has been an increasing challenge.

“The current year’s financial position for the Education Authority is a projected shortfall of circa £300m. This is not a situation anyone at EA wants to be in. It is nevertheless the reality. We have been advised that, unlike the position in previous years, additional significant funding allocations are unlikely to be made available to address this shortfall.

“The Education Authority has therefore regrettably been required to identify a series of significant savings measures.”

The savings measures identified as being deliverable, and now being taken forward by EA, have the “potential to realise up to £30m in savings”. They will start to take effect from this month.

They include:

• Implementing savings in home to school transport, including potential renegotiated payments to taxi operators; and exploring options on individual school transport arrangements that are outside EA’s legislative and policy obligations.
• A 50p increase in the price of a set school meal for paying pupils (primary, nursery and special schools) with equivalent percentage increases for food items in school cafeterias (post primary schools). These increases will take effect from January 2026. Pupils receiving free school meals will not be impacted.
• Savings impacting the EA’s Music Service. The Music Service is a non-statutory service, meaning it is one of the limited areas where there is discretion to make savings without legislative or policy change.
• Suspending further referrals to external, contracted providers of EOTAS (Education Other Than At School) services.
• Ending some agency contracts and reducing overtime payments across the EA’s corporate workforce.

The EA statement continued: “While these measures will inevitably have an adverse impact on services, it is also the case that they can only make a partial contribution to achieving a break-even budget, as securing in-year savings is severely limited for the EA by two factors.

“1. Circa 85% of our annual expenditure is incurred on payroll costs, including pay for teachers and school support staff. Making significant reductions to this cost, aside from the implications for service provision, would require a funded severance scheme. Such a scheme is not available. 2. Virtually all EA’s services are statutory in nature – thus those services cannot be lawfully stopped.”

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