THE Ulster Teachers' Union has called on the North's Standing Advisory Commission on Human Rights to investigate the funding of schools and educational administration.
On the final day of its annual conference in Belfast on Saturday, delegates voted by a majority for the proposal in an amendment by the central executive committee.
It replaced a resolution from Clogher Valley branch which called for a review of funding for social deprivation to ensure that controlled (Protestant) and maintained (Catholic) schools benefit equally.
At present, almost two thirds of the £19.6 million social deprivation budget goes to the maintained sector because Catholic are twice as likely to be living in poverty, as measured by the official index of eligibility for free school meals.
Mr Malcolm Duffy, proposing the original motion, claimed the method of allocating the money was creating a feeling of great unfairness and "a groundswell of anger and rejection".
He said the pendulum had swung too far in redressing the historic under funding of maintained compared with controlled schools and teachers were facing an avalanche of redundancies, many of them caused by the unfair distribution of funds.
"This is not new money, Mr Duffy argued. "It has been siphoned off from the middle class areas and directed towards less privileged socio economic groups in the west. What it has created is a new under class of schools which have been plunged into a state of financial over spend and under funding."
Mr David Allen, general secretary, said the motion was worthy of consideration but could be dismissed as bigoted and sectarian. "A fundamental flaw in the motion is that it addresses only one side of the problem. It is an irrefutable fact that there are differences in funding within the controlled sector. This is a much wider issue than the funding of controlled and maintained schools."
Mr Ivan Davidson, a former president, said it would be totally wrong to take this as a sectarian issue and that the funding of different schools could only be compared over a period of years. "An important issue is whether the money for social deprivation is actually used to help the deprived. It may go into the general school budget."
A proposal to move to the next business without a vote was defeated narrowly and the executive's amendment was then carried.