Northern Ireland schools told to put on extra layers as energy bills forecast to jump by £8m

Schools across Northern Ireland have been instructed to tell staff and pupils to dress more warmly when classrooms get chilly, as the body that funds them warns of a sharp rise in gas and electricity costs over the coming year.

The Education Authority (EA) has written to head teachers urging them to trim their consumption of heating and lighting "wherever possible" in an effort to limit the damage to already stretched school budgets.

According to the authority's own projections, the combined gas and electricity bills for schools in the region are on course to climb by roughly £8m by March 2027, a significant additional pressure for institutions that are already managing tight finances.

The letter sets out the scale of the expected increases in some detail. Total gas spending by schools is forecast to surge by 60%, rising from £10.7m to £17m over the course of the 2026/27 financial year. Electricity costs are expected to grow more modestly, but still upward, going from £23.8m to £25.1m — a 5% increase — over the same period.

The EA has explicitly linked the projected surge to events on the world stage, telling school leaders that "recent geopolitical events are expected to have a substantial impact on energy costs" for the authority during the 2026/27 financial year. The conflict between the US and Israel involving Iran has been identified as one of the factors pushing prices higher.

That pressure is not confined to the school gates. Households throughout Northern Ireland are already feeling the effects of climbing energy costs, meaning families could face a double squeeze as the new academic year progresses — higher bills at home and a warmer or colder school environment depending on where their children study.

Faced with that outlook, the EA has set out a series of practical steps it believes could bring consumption down. Among them are reducing heating use by one hour each day and encouraging classrooms to rely on natural daylight by switching off electric lights wherever conditions allow.

The most eye-catching of the recommendations, however, is the simplest: rather than turning up the thermostat when temperatures drop, staff and pupils have been told to "wear more clothes" and layer up instead.

But principals on the ground have cautioned that the advice is far easier to issue than it is to act upon, warning that the buildings many children learn in simply were not designed for aggressive energy savings.

Kirsty Logan-Hall, who leads Tullygally Primary School in Craigavon, said her school was "committed to promoting responsible energy consumption and regularly reinforce good practice with staff and pupils". She stressed, though, that the physical fabric of the site places hard limits on what can realistically be achieved.

Her school occupies an older building, which she said brings "inherent energy efficiency challenges" that cannot be solved by behavioural changes alone. The site is also unusually spread out because of the accommodation and operational demands of the specialist provision the school offers.

As a result, heating, lighting and general use of multiple areas have to continue throughout the school day to guarantee suitable learning environments, accessibility and pupil welfare. Logan-Hall said there is only limited room to cut consumption further "without adversely impacting the quality of provision, staff working conditions or the wellbeing of pupils, including those with additional needs".

A similar picture emerges several miles away at Holy Evangelists Primary School in Dunmurry, where principal Claire Robinson described current energy costs in stark terms as "ferocious".

Robinson said she simply cannot "play around with the heating" at her site. Although parts of the school are relatively modern and fitted with underfloor heating, those systems mean classroom temperatures must be maintained above a certain minimum.

"We can't just turn the heating off in some areas of the school," she explained, pointing to the practical reality that thermostats cannot be treated as an on-off switch in buildings of this design.

In a further illustration of the difficulties, Robinson revealed that despite being a fairly recent build, Holy Evangelists has been handed an energy efficiency rating of D — a reflection of the cost involved in running its heating system.

Taken together, the warnings from both principals underline the tension at the heart of the EA's advice: schools are being asked to find savings at a time when their buildings, pupils and staffing needs leave them with very little flexibility.

For parents and pupils, the coming year may well bring visible changes to daily school life, from lights left off on bright mornings to chillier corridors in the depths of winter. Whether the measures will be enough to offset a projected £8m bill increase remains to be seen.