Essex has long been stereotyped for its bubbly TV personalities, but these days it is better known for its bubbly school roofs. The preponderance of reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete (Raac) – a cheaper but more porous version of the more durable midcentury favourite – in its educational facilities has made Essex, as it often is during general elections, the canary in the coalmine. Last week it was revealed that out of the 147 schools nationwide affected by Raac, more than a third, 58, were in the county – from Jamie Oliver’s old grammar the Joyce Frankland academy near Saffron Walden in the north, to the Bromfords school in Wickford in the south, where reality star Chantelle Houghton was a student.
As always when faced with a mounting crisis, the government sent for a scapegoat, this time reaching further back than Covid and Ukraine – further even than the two-decade tenure of New Labour – to Germany’s invasion of Poland. The Department for Education (DfE) blamed “the second world war” for having precipitated the boom in building in Essex that required cheap materials such as Raac. “We’ve looked at this as Essex does have a large number of the cases and it’s largely because of the fact that there was a lot of postwar building in and around Essex,” said the education secretary, Gillian Keegan.
