“Wear more clothes,” the Education Authority advises the staff and pupils of north of Ireland’s schools. Gas is dearer, electricity is dearer, and so the child must come to class more thickly wrapped. The authority has discovered a remarkably simple way of dealing with an increase in prices: those who need the heat must learn to do with less of it.
Let us look at the figures behind this advice. By March 2027, the schools’ total gas bill is expected to rise from £10.7m to £17m, an increase of 60 percent. Electricity bills are expected to rise by 5 percent, from £23.8m to £25.1m. Altogether, about £8m more is to be found. From these estimates the authority proceeds to its recommendations: cut heating by an hour a day, switch off classroom lights and use daylight, put on more clothes if it is cold. The price of energy supplies the premise; the conditions in which children learn supply the adjustment.
Schools are to reduce consumption “wherever possible”. A most accommodating phrase! The authority leaves the heads to discover what is possible, and the heads have begun to explain. Their explanations deserve considerably more attention than the advice which called them forth.
At Tullygally Primary in Craigavon, Kirsty Logan-Hall describes an older building with inherent difficulties in using energy efficiently. The school’s specialist provision also requires accommodation spread across the site. These areas have to be heated and lit throughout the school day for teaching, accessibility and pupil welfare. To tell this school to consume less, without changing the conditions under which it consumes, is to press upon precisely the provision it exists to make. Children with additional needs require the rooms; the rooms require heat. The official circular cannot abolish either requirement.
Nor does a newer building settle the matter. At Holy Evangelists Primary in Dunmurry, parts of the school have underfloor heating, and classrooms have to be kept above a certain temperature. Claire Robinson explains that heating cannot simply be switched off in selected areas. Despite being relatively new, the school has an energy efficiency rating of D, which she attributes to the cost of running its heating system. Here, too, the head is asked to find an economy within arrangements that restrict the very economies being demanded.
Perhaps the schools have been careless? Emma Quinn of Rathcoole Primary disposes of that suggestion. They are already eco schools; they already switch off lights. She points to the lack of maintenance and objects to having a systemic problem delivered to the school’s doorstep for the staff to solve. Logan-Hall likewise says that Tullygally already promotes responsible energy consumption. The people responsible for running these schools have had to explain that they know what a light switch is, before they can get a hearing about the buildings in which the switches are fitted!
We can now see what the instruction to economise amounts to. Where waste can be eliminated, eliminating it is sensible. But once the head has reached the point at which a further reduction impairs teaching, working conditions or pupil welfare, the saving is obtained at somebody’s expense. An hour less heating has to be endured by the people who remain in the building. Put the financial saving in one column and the discomfort of pupils and staff in another, and the economy loses much of its splendour. The second column is absent from the advice to put on more clothes.
The price is treated as something the school must submit to; the warmth is treated as something the child can surrender. There you have the order of precedence. Energy is sold as a commodity, and the demand for payment arrives before the public authority as an obligation. The children’s need for that energy arrives before the head as something to be reconsidered in the light of the obligation! The advice faithfully translates the demands of the market into instructions for the classroom.
One of the forces driving these increases is the US-Israel war with Iran. In the EA’s letter this appears under the decorous name of “recent geopolitical events”. Follow these events a little further than the official phrase takes us, and we arrive at schools whose heads are asked to cut an hour’s heating. The powers that wage an imperialist war need send no bill directly to the child; the energy market and the public budget carry its costs into the classroom. Households in Northern Ireland are already facing rising energy costs. The same pressure now follows their children through the school gates.
Put energy production and public investment under the control of the working class, and begin the calculation with the children who have to be taught. Tullygally needs heated accommodation across its site because its pupils need the provision made there. Supply it, and direct the work of repair and improvement towards reducing the fuel required to maintain it. The labour and materials spent on that work could be weighed against the fuel saved and the conditions secured. The very facts which now bring the head up against the school budget would tell a workers’ administration where work and resources were required. That is a task for socialist planning; a circular about personal frugality cannot perform it.
Such planning would give the demand to save energy a definite social purpose. Repairing a building so that less heat escapes could save fuel while improving conditions for everyone inside it. Shortening the heating period in a building that still needs to be used saves fuel by making its occupants bear the loss of warmth. Anyone can grasp the difference. Yet the authority addresses its appeal for economy to the occupants, who have no power to repair the estate merely by being more frugal.
The principals have answered with the facts of their daily work: the rooms must be used, the children must be accommodated, the heating cannot simply be switched off. The letter offers no remedy for the buildings they describe. It offers advice for the people inside them. “Wear more clothes”: the pupil is to carry on their own back the adjustment demanded of the school budget.
