The school buildings crisis is threatening to engulf Downing Street, with Rishi Sunak accused of slashing the budget for repairs while his education secretary was caught claiming colleagues had done nothing to stop it.
As pupils began returning to schools around England on Monday – or in some cases took lessons from home or in temporary classrooms – the prime minister faced claims he failed to grasp the gravity of the situation as chancellor.
Former Department for Education (DfE) officials said staff in the department were shocked when a request to fund work on 300 to 400 schools at risk from crumbling concrete panels was pared down, to 100 and then 50, by Sunak’s Treasury in 2020 and 2021.
As No 10 pushed back against the claims, Gillian Keegan, the education secretary, was forced to apologise after she was caught complaining to a TV reporter that others with responsibility for school repairs had “sat on their arse” rather than act.
The unguarded comments were made when the cameras continued rolling after a formal interview was over, with Keegan asking grumpily: “Does anyone ever say: ‘You know what, you’ve done a fucking good job, because everyone else has sat on their arse and done nothing.’ No signs of that, no?”
She later apologised for her “off-the-cuff remark” and “unnecessary choice of language” after receiving a dressing-down from Downing Street for behaviour that was “not acceptable”.
Focus soon turned to the accusation Sunak personally played a big role in the crisis by drastically cutting back on the DfE’s efforts to repair or replace schools.
This first emerged early on Monday, when Jonathan Slater, the DfE’s top civil servant from 2016 to 2020, told the BBC that a request to replace up to 400 schools was first slashed to 100 by Sunak, and then in the next year’s funding round to just 50.
This happened despite the DfE presenting the Treasury with evidence that deterioration in reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete (Raac), used to build many schools from the 1950s onwards, represented “a critical risk to life”, Slater said, with ministers instead prioritising new free schools.
One former senior DfE official said there had always been an expectation of a cut to the original bid for 300 to 400 schools. “But the eventual decision to go for 100, and then cut this to 50, was a real surprise,” they said.
The official likened Sunak’s decision to his choice in 2021 to slash a planned budget for helping children catch up educationally after Covid from £15bn to £1.4bn.
“There have been these two really big calls, generational things, and it feels like he didn’t properly get either of them,” they said. “With both, funding-wise, we needed a bazooka, and we got a pea shooter.”
They added: “It’s hard to know if this is a blind spot for Rishi, or more of a wider Treasury thing, that they just see education as a cost, not an investment.”
One former DfE civil servant said that although funding bids were almost always “managed down”, it was felt that the scale of the cuts meant the problem was not taken seriously by the Treasury.
“There was frustration with the Treasury, and then just resignation,” they said, agreeing that the free schools programme had been favoured: “I wouldn’t say fixing broken schools was not a priority, but you can’t have five top priorities. You have to have one.”
A briefing note by the Institute for Fiscal Studies thinktank set out a wider decline in spending on school buildings in recent years. Its analysis showed average capital spending down by around a quarter in real terms since the mid-2000s and 50% below a 2010 peak.
Average annual spending over the last three years was lower than any point since 2004, the IFS said, with funding allocations for maintenance and rebuilding more than 40% below levels of need as assessed by the government itself.
Downing Street has argued that “hundreds, not thousands” of schools are likely to be affected by crumbling concrete panels, an argument stressed also by Sunak during a TV clip, his first formal response to the issue.
“There are around 22,000 schools in England and the important thing to know is that we expect that 95% of those schools won’t be impacted by this,” Sunak said.
Keegan, making a formal statement to the Commons on Monday afternoon, said she was being “deliberately cautious” about Raac, arguing that in most affected schools, disruption would only last for days.
Responding for Labour, the shadow education secretary, Bridget Phillipson, accused Keegan and Sunak of trying to shirk responsibility. “What an utter shambles,” she said. “The defining image of 13 years of Conservative government: children cowering under steel props to stop the ceiling falling in on their heads.”
Sunak and Keegan face a growing crisis not just over educational logistics, but perceived competence, with even a list of affected schools yet to be published, although due this week.
There is also minimal information about the potential extent of other public buildings at risk from Raac, which has a supposed 30-year maximum lifespan.
The Ministry of Justice confirmed on Monday that an audit of court buildings built from the 1950s to the 1980s had now been extended into the 1990s, after the 90s-built Harrow crown court was closed when Raac was discovered in its fabric.
There was also anger in Wales, with the education minister, Jeremy Miles, saying Welsh government officials were not warned about new safety concerns during a meeting on Raac on 24 August, a week before the current alert began.
