School funds shock

The school had received £116,200 over five years under the scheme, but due to a reworking of the way in which the Extended Schools Funding is nowcalculated based on statistics in a report from NISRA in May 2010, next Thursday the School Governors will be forced to decide where the cost-cutting axe will fall.

Mr McMaster said an innovative after school scheme and clubs only recently initiated within the school, are among those that may have to be shelved if alternative funding streams cannot be found.

“For the last five years the school had been receiving funding under the Extended Schools Scheme. This allowed us to open our school earlier and close it later, andwewere able to operate a breakfast Club, which was subsidised heavily by the funding.

“This was so successful that in 2009 we won the Northern Ireland Breakfast Club of the Year award.

“Because of this funding we were also able to run clubs within clubs in the school for things like reading, and in the afternoon we were able to bring in specialist teachers for drama and the French Assistant had a French Club and we were also able to open the school to the community and ran a keep-fit club during the week, and an orchestra one night a week,” he said.

Mr McMaster said there had been no warning that the blow was coming: “We had absolutely no warning and had no idea they had rejigged the formulae until we got a letter on April 13 from the Department of Education saying that our funding had now been withdrawn and they were only going to give us three twelfths of the funding to do us until the end of June.

Decision

“The big thing for us was we had just opened a new school club in February which runs from 2pm to 6pm during the week and at holiday times to help working parents.

“We are going to have to make a decision next Thursday at the Governor’s meeting about whether or not we can maintain this and whether it is financially viable without being able to fund it through Extended Schools,” he said, revealing that parents had been asked for feedback about paying for the service.

The loss of funding comes about through a different way the Department now has of determining what percentage of children in each school come from ‘neighbourhood renewal areas’.

Acknowledging that some schools would ‘win’ while others, like Drumahoe, would lose out, Mr McMaster said his main

difficulty arose because of the lack of communication about the changes in advance which had robbed him of his ability to plan strategically for the future.

“There appears to have been no strategic thinking behind this. No one said they were doing this and no one was giving us updates.

“We would not have planned to open an after school club and employ people if the possibility existed that we could not maintain it financially.

“That’s the annoying thing,” he said, adding: “We would have liked a lot more warning because we would have had serious thinking to do about the long-term sustainability of the after school club without that funding.

“The fact is its existence is in serious jeopardy without it. The after school club and the clubs within that club are in serious jeopardy.”

Alderman April Garfield-Kidd said the impact on the school would be devastating.

“The loss of funding will be absolutely devastating, particularly during the summer months. The club the school ran was highly successful last year, and I know a -couple of the other schools in the city looked to Drumahoe Primary as

a blue print for excellence and a role model for their own schools. There was a brilliant uptake for this after

school scheme and it seems wrong when they have been so successful that they could not pre-empt what was coming before they were put in the position of having to react to this change rather than being able to plan for it,” she said.

Mrs Garfield-Kidd said that she would be liaising closely with the school to see if local politicians could do anything to help.