September is, for many parents, a bittersweet month. It’s the season of new beginnings and stiff shoes, of 11-year-olds drowning in ridiculously large blazers and of watching bleary-eyed as the tiniest ones toddle away from you into reception class. But this year, there’s perhaps more of an edge than usual to letting them go, thanks to a nagging fear of the roof quite literally falling in.
Thousands of children won’t be returning to their normal classrooms this week after all, after an 11th-hour alarm over the risks posed by reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete (Raac), a lightweight form of concrete used in some postwar buildings now deemed at risk of collapse. While repairs are carried out, some children will be housed in prefabs or hastily repurposed school halls; others may be back to home learning. After three years of pandemic-induced disruption, what children need most is stability, but instead once again some headteachers are having to tear up plans at the last minute – while others whose schools aren’t on the danger list will be busy fielding questions from worried parents. Imagine, then, the reaction in staff rooms across the land when the education secretary, Gillian Keegan, was unwittingly caught on camera suggesting everyone else had “sat on their arses and done nothing” about crumbling classrooms, while she’d got no recognition for doing a “fucking good job”.
Crumbling concrete has also been identified in courtrooms and hospitals – including one where obese patients could be treated only on the ground floor for fear the upper floors wouldn’t take the strain, according to Labour’s Meg Hillier, the chair of the Commons public accounts committee, which is currently investigating Raac in public buildings. The metaphors about a country falling apart at the seams, and the consequences quite literally hanging over children’s heads, write themselves, reinforcing a wider national story about corners being cut and chickens squawking home to roost. What’s different about this one, however, is the trail of feathers currently being laid to Rishi Sunak’s door.
Jonathan Slater was once the most senior civil servant at the Department for Education, until he was controversially sacked as permanent secretary in 2020 after a row over lockdown exam grading for which some felt ministers should have taken more of the blame. Back in 2018 – the same year part of the concrete roof over a Kent primary school caved in, fortunately when classrooms were empty – his department commissioned research showing 300-400 schools a year might need crumbling buildings repaired. The Treasury agreed to fund repairs for only 100 a year, Slater told the BBC, in an interview broadcast just as families were getting up for the Monday school run.
But still, he hoped more money might be forthcoming: after all, the incoming prime minister, Boris Johnson, kept saying the age of austerity was over, though new free schools seemed more of a priority for government than making the old ones safe. He himself had left Whitehall by the time of Sunak’s 2021 spending review, but Slater insisted his old department put in a bid to double the repair programme to 200 schools a year – only for Rishi Sunak to halve it instead, to 50.
Sunak, it should be said, insists all this is “completely and utterly untrue” since he’d already unveiled a new school repair programme in the 2020 spending round. But the small print is clear: Sunak’s new promise was to fix 500 schools in a decade, equivalent to 50 a year. Presumably, some schools were going to have to wait. The question is who decided, amid the intense haggling of a spending round, that the risk of doing so was acceptable.
As Slater himself acknowledges, there’s never enough cash to do everything, especially perhaps in a pandemic where the chancellor was already earmarking billions to help children catch up on lost learning in lockdown. And even in well-run governments, there will be issues serious enough to cause sleepless nights but that will still be eclipsed by something that at the time looks even more terrifying. Whitehall lives in fear of such overlooked slow-burning fuses causing what in retrospect seems an avoidable tragedy, but that doesn’t quite explain what happened here.
Alarm bells were very publicly ringing at the DfE by last year, when it named building failures as one of six key risks in its annual report, alongside lockdown learning loss. But even in his time, Slater said repairs were seen potentially as a matter of life and death: “We weren’t just saying there’s a significant risk of fatality. We were saying there’s a critical risk to life if the programme is not funded.” Thankfully, it didn’t ultimately take a child being killed for someone to act, with Keegan intervening after commissioning expert advice on several Raac-related collapses in public buildings this summer. But still, that’s far too lucky an escape for comfort.
As Keegan appeared to be hinting, perhaps it didn’t help that in the chaotic 13 months between Gavin Williamson being sacked and her taking charge, the department got through six education secretaries on the trot, some of whom were barely in office long enough to change the nameplate on their doors let alone to master every detail of their briefs. But if there was a blind spot in the Treasury on this issue, it’s arguably a longstanding one.
Last December, when the DfE raised the risk of English school buildings collapsing to “very likely”, the former education special adviser Sam Freedman tweeted that back in his day he’d had “so many arguments with the Treasury about this and they always insisted it was better value for money to put capital into roads etc”. Chancellors tend to favour infrastructure spending on which they get a return, like GDP-boosting transport projects or fast broadband, not the dreary but necessary work of patching up and making good.
Even this week, the Treasury’s first instinct was to brief that it wouldn’t provide any new funding for emergency Raac repairs this autumn, meaning the DfE will have to take the cash from other budgets. The penny-pinching goes on, even though across public services a crystal clear theme is now emerging of skimping and scrimping eventually coming back to haunt the government, sometimes only years after the event. And it’s that time lapse that is in some ways the most frightening thing.
Like the flammable cladding that led to such unspeakable tragedy when wrapped around Grenfell Tower, Raac became part of Britain’s postwar fabric because it was quicker, cheaper and more convenient than building with full-strength concrete. Decades later, it’s painfully obvious that was a false economy. The more disturbing question is how many other quick fixes, cheap compromises and questionable solutions to tight budgets have been quietly invented not just in construction but across the public realm during the past cash-strapped decade, with unseen consequences still yet to unfold for decades to come.
Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
