Reinforced Autoclaved Aerated Concrete in Education Settings

I must thank the professional response of leaders, teachers and support staff in the sector, who have acted swiftly to deliver contingency plans. Each impacted school and college has a dedicated caseworker to help implement a mitigation plan. This could include other spaces on the school site or in nearby schools, or elsewhere in the local area, until structural supports or temporary buildings are installed. We have increased the supply of temporary buildings, working with three contractors, and accelerated the installation of these. We have the support of our leading utility companies to ensure that those classrooms can be opened. In the small number of schools with confirmed RAAC, disruption to face-to-face learning has usually lasted a matter of days.

With regard to funding, as the Chancellor said, we will spend whatever it takes to keep children safe. That includes paying for the emergency mitigation work needed to make buildings safe, including alternative classroom space where necessary. Where schools need additional help with revenue costs, such as transport to other locations, we are actively engaging with every school affected in order to put appropriate support in place. We will also fund the longer-term refurbishment or rebuilding projects, where these are needed, to rectify RAAC.

Professional advice from technical experts on RAAC has evolved over time. Indeed, the question of how to manage its risks across all sectors has spanned successive Governments since 1994. My Department alerted the sector about the potential risks of RAAC in 2018, following a sudden roof collapse at a primary school. We published a warning note with the Local Government Association, which asked all responsible bodies to

“Identify any properties constructed using RAAC”

and to

“ensure that RAAC properties are regularly inspected by a structural engineer”.

In February 2021 we issued a guide on how to identify RAAC. Concerned that not all responsible bodies were acting quickly enough, in 2022 we decided to take a more direct approach. We issued a questionnaire to responsible bodies for all 22,000 schools to ask them to identify whether or not they had, or suspected to might have, RAAC. Responsible bodies have submitted responses to the questionnaire for 95% of schools with blocks built in the target period.

In September 2022 we started a programme where the DFE sent a professional surveyor to assess whether RAAC is present. If RAAC was present, the previous DFE guidance was to grade it as critical or non-critical, and only take buildings out of use for critical RAAC cases. Such was the level of our concern, however, that I asked officials to seek evidence of risks, including to non-critical RAAC. It is because of this proactive approach that we discovered details of three new cases over the summer, where RAAC that would have been graded as non-critical had failed without warning. The first was in a commercial setting. The second was in a school in a different educational jurisdiction. In that instance, the plank that failed remained suspended, resting on a steel beam. As the plank was fully intact, DFE engineers were able to investigate the situation. In their professional judgment, the panel affected would have been previously rated as non-critical, but it had failed.

Ministerial colleagues and I were already extremely concerned, but then a third failure of RAAC panels occurred, at a school in England in late August. This was a panel that had previously been graded as non-critical. Because children’s safety is our absolute priority, it was right to make the difficult decision to change our guidance for education settings, so that areas previously deemed to contain non-critical RAAC are now being closed.

I want to set out why we are taking this more cautious approach with the education estate in England. Professional guidance is clear that wherever RAAC is found, it needs to be monitored closely. The school estate is very disparate, consisting of 22,000 settings with more than 64,000 individual blocks. Monitoring RAAC closely is therefore very difficult on the estate, and many responsible bodies do not have dedicated estates professionals on all school or college sites at all times. That is why the approach we are taking is the right one for our schools and colleges. My officials have worked closely with experts in this field. Chris Goodier, professor of construction engineering and materials at Loughborough University, has said:

“DfE has been employing some of the best engineers on this and have consulted us and the Institution of Structural Engineers”.

The Government’s priority is for every child in the UK to go to school safely. My officials have been engaging urgently with the devolved Administrations to discuss our findings and offer support in order to understand the situation in relation to RAAC on school estates in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Last week I wrote to offer my support, including further official or ministerial-level engagement, and to facilitate discussions between our technical experts.

I am aware that this policy change occurred during the recess, and that I was therefore unable to notify the House in advance. For that I apologise, Madam Deputy Speaker, and I hope you understand why I felt that I had to take the decision when I did. We are taking an extremely cautious approach to the issue, but I believe that this is the right thing to do when it comes to the safety of children. I commend this statement to the House.

The Schools Minister today is the same Schools Minister who scrapped Labour’s plans as one of his very first acts back in 2010. In 2010 the Conservatives scaled back plans to just 150 school rebuilding projects each year, slowing the pace of renewal. In 2021, when their then Chancellor—now the Prime Minister—delivered a spending review, he cut the pace again to just 50 a year, and today the previous permanent secretary at the Department for Education told of the Department’s bid to double the schools rebuilding programme in 2021 being knocked back by the then Chancellor, who instead of doubling it, almost halved it.

I spoke earlier of responsibility. The Secretary of State was clear just a few hours ago that she refuses to accept any responsibility, so who on the Government Benches today will take responsibility for decision after decision to slash spending on school safety? I thank the Secretary of State for having addressed some of the questions that families across this country will have, but I am afraid that there are many, many more. Time is short, so I will ask many of them in writing, but I hope that she will be able to answer these questions now, and to answer all my questions in full.

Why is the Secretary of State still refusing to publish the list of affected schools, promptly and in full, today? Why did the condition data collection survey between 2017 and 2019 not look in more detail at these issues? What strategy does the Department have right now for the wider condition of system build schools and other educational premises that are long past their design lifespan? How many other educational settings are currently believed, or suspected, by the Department to contain RAAC where that is yet to be confirmed? Do emergency services have the information they need, should something go wrong? What is the estimated timeline for completing the necessary repairs in affected schools? How long will students face disruption during this process? Which capital budgets are being raided and which priorities are being downgraded today to fund the works that are happening now? What assessment has been made of the risks of a RAAC failure in the context where asbestos is also present? There are many more questions I could ask, but the most important is this: who in this Government in the months ahead will take some responsibility for sorting out the chaos that our children face?