SINN Féin Education spokesperson Karen Mullan has clarified accusations that she was ‘scaremongering’ in her response to a jointly signed letter signed by Derry principals last week.
The Foyle MLA faced an onslaught of public backlash yesterday when her response to the Letter from Principals was posted on Facebook, sparking outrage amongst parents and the wider public.
In the letter, Mullan wrote: ‘While I recognise some schools are facing significant pressures it is important to point out that not all schools are experiencing the issues highlighted in the letter. Such broad and sweeping assertions have the potential to cause unnecessary stress and anxiety for parents.’
This comes after primary school parents were handed a letter by their children last week, co-signed by principals from Catholic, controlled, integrated and Irish medium schools warning of the damaging repercussions of budget cuts in schools.
Principals revealed the amount of funding received per pupil has been cut by 4% over the past four years – meaning there could be huge cuts for teaching and support staff, longer waiting lists for additional and special educational needs services and higher charges for after-school clubs are “an inevitable outcome”.
However, Mullan insisted her letter was not received in the way she had intended and it wasn’t the first letter she had sent to primary schools across the city.
Karen Mullan said: “It is highly disappointing for me that the content published has been misrepresented online, with one page (of the letter) only going out at the start, the second didn’t, because at no stage did I intend or tell anybody to stop scaremongering.
“I have two teenagers of my own at two post-primary schools in this city, I understand and I see the difficulty and how hard it is for principles in the current financial situation and everything else they have to deal with.
“And my letter and my intent was to reiterate my wholehearted support for schools and to offer that I would personally intervene to support them.
“This is not the first letter that I have sent to schools,” she said. “When I went into this role last year, I sent a letter to all the schools in the city introducing myself and offering support in the current climate.
“A number of those schools took up the support and I work very closely with them and I have been able to intervene with the Education Authority on individual issues and we’ve had quite a number of successes.”
“My intent was offering any support that I could and it was genuine and any of the schools that work with me would know that it certainly wasn’t to attack anyone or scaremonger anybody – I am a parent myself.”
The letter was issued to parents on October 9
The Sinn Fein representative said she was fully behind support for greater education funding and insisted she was ‘very proactive’ when it came to urgent educational needs.
“It is my responsibility as a public representative to show leadership and contact schools and that’s what I did, I am not sure if anybody else did that,” she said.
“I get the sense of frustration from principals and I understand that, but my response was intended to address that not all schools are in the same situation. We need to look at these cases individually and look at where we can help and what we can do, but it was never my intention to upset anyone.”
Northern Ireland has been without a devolved government since January 2017 when the Assembly collapsed but Mullan was keen to stress that these financial problems are only the ‘tipping point of the last eight years’.
“We all have to work together on our children’s education and that’s why I wrote to everybody about the letter. The difficulty with this is this has not happened over the last year or two unfortunately and when you talk individually to principles they agree with me.
“I had some parents who had contacted me who have special educational needs that I have helped out in the past and they had read the principals letter and they read the letter wrong. They thought special education needs funding was being cut and their child was going to be affected.
“Again, in the letter it said ‘may’, these things ‘may’ happen but they wouldn’t happen in all schools, so parents were worried, but there are no cuts in the special education budget,” she said.
“People can (use my letter) as points scoring for themselves but in this case, as I said, my intent was genuine and I am not sure if others wrote to the schools offering support but I did and I will continue to do that.”
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