The Post Primary Teachers Association said school operational funding requires a $300 million adjustment to keep pace with inflation.
The union said annual increases to the operations grant tracked inflation between 2011 and 2021 but have since fallen behind.
It said the grant should be 12% higher than its current $2.5 billion annual level.
The PPTA said next week’s government budget would need to include a 16% increase to recover lost ground and keep pace with current inflation forecasts.
PPTA president Chris Abercrombie said schools rely on the operations grant to cover all costs not funded through teacher staffing entitlements or specialist property funding.
“It pays for the lawns to be mowed, it pays for the resources in the classroom, it pays for the toilet paper,” Abercrombie said.
“It pays for absolutely everything that is not teachers in school.”
Abercrombie said that in 2021, an average secondary school with around 800 students received roughly $1.8 million in operational funding. Since then, that amount has increased by about $220,000, but to keep pace with inflation, he said it should have risen by $450,000.
Abercrombie said the declining value of the operations grant was evident in schools, with many forced to make difficult trade-offs.
“Some of the lower-level maintenance might get delayed so they can pay for teacher aides, school PLD [professional learning and development] might get pushed back or changed, or maybe there’s not enough money to pay for relief teachers so teachers can’t go on with their courses. Those kinds of decisions schools are increasingly having to make,” he explained.
Steve McCracken, chair of the PPTA Secondary Principals’ Council, said the union’s figures would resonate with schools.
“If school leaders have been wondering why it feels increasingly difficult to make ends meet and you’re having to do more with less, this explains why,” he said.
He said an almost 12% gap was significant, adding that schools could only imagine what they might achieve if operational funding kept pace with inflation.