Fact File - Maintenance of the Schools Estate | Education Authority Northern Ireland

The Education Authority (EA) is responsible for an extensive public estate across NI, involving more than 1,100 schools, with an estimated value of around £4.6 billion.
As with any asset, our estate needs to be maintained to ensure it is safe and functional. Maintenance activity has four aspects to it:
- Cyclical maintenance – undertaken on a cyclical basis, to stop more significant (and more expensive) issues arising; minor fabric renewal, decoration programmes, bitmac resurfacing, floor covering replacement, gutter cleaning.
- Reactive response maintenance – responding to issues as and when they arise. These issues include significant roofing and heating pipework leaks and electrical faults requiring emergency and urgent repairs.
- Statutory compliance maintenance - eg the systematic inspections of fire alarm systems, gas infrastructure, fixed wire testing, asbestos management, legionella control, appliance testing etc and the remedial works to meet legal and regulatory requirements.
- Planned maintenance – this includes the renewal of major elements such as roof upgrades, boiler/plant renewals, window upgrades and structural works to sustain the long-term condition of the building fabric.
Industry best practice suggests that around 2% of a property’s value should be spent annually on maintenance (this reflects steady‑state maintenance only and excludes any backlog maintenance). This suggests the minimum spend necessary for the EA school estate would be some £92 million per annum.
In 2025/26 EA’s maintenance budget provided for total maintenance spend of £61.1 million – which can be analysed against each component as described above:
- Cyclical maintenance – NIL. No funding has been available for any form of proactive maintenance activities across the school estate for many years. Routine activity that prevents more expensive problems developing has therefore not been carried out. This has not been by choice - it is simply down to a lack of funding.
- Reactive response maintenance - £23.6 million. The constrained budget meant we were only able to deal with reactive maintenance issues and have had no option but to concentrate on emergency, time critical and essential works - like school heating system failures, significant roof leaks and other safety critical priorities. Our overriding objectives are keeping children and staff safe and schools open where possible. More routine issues, estimated at £2.3 million, were unaddressed as the funding wasn’t available.
- Statutory compliance maintenance - £19.5 million (statutory inspections and remedials).
- Planned maintenance - £18 million (In the context of the EA school estate, this was emergency and unavoidable works). Again, more needs to be spent on this aspect, but the funding is not available.
The absence of funding for cyclical maintenance, and the shortfall in funding for reactive and planned maintenance, inevitably leads to a growing backlog of work year on year, and to long-term deterioration of the school estate. It also means the risk of school closures on safety grounds will continue to grow. We will soon reach the position where schools, or part of schools, routinely need to close due to unaddressed maintenance issues.
EA estimates that the NI school maintenance backlog is now between £600 million and £800 million. This was confirmed by an Assembly Public Accounts Committee report last October. This will continue to grow each year, unless our maintenance budget is increased to circa £90 million – and it is only with annual funding above that level that we will be able to start addressing the backlog.
Despite the resource constraints, significant activity takes place. In 2025/26, we completed approximately 50,000 reactive repairs. This means that, on average, we carried out around 1,000 every single week. Put another way, on average every school received around one maintenance repair every week.
In terms of the efficiency and effectiveness of this activity, a new initiative has been implemented to enhance delivery by private sector contractors. These new contracts are designed to strengthen contractor accountability and improve how maintenance work is monitored for responsiveness, completion, quality and health and safety.
Contractors are measured against defined performance standards, activity is tracked, and EA can intervene more quickly if standards are not met. Schools will also have clearer information about how maintenance requests are managed.
In summary, and as described above, the scale of EA’s maintenance activity – and the condition of our schools estate - will only change materially when there is a significant increase in the level of funding provided to EA for this essential activity.