The government has had a busy week trying to deal with the school buildings crisis. This hasn’t involved doing anything about all the dangerous school buildings – it’s far too late for that. That’s not the job of modern politicians anyway: their aim isn’t to improve the country, merely to evade responsibility for its shortcomings. Navigate towards the popular things and away from the unpopular and/or disastrous ones.
Thus, Rishi Sunak’s main intervention into the issue of large lumps of flimsy concrete mouldering above thousands of schoolchildren’s flimsier heads has been to assert that it is “completely and utterly wrong” to blame him for it. The topic of blaming the prime minister hasn’t arisen just because he’s the head of the government and so, when there’s a catastrophic failure in the state’s duty to its people, the buck stops with him. No, it was suggested that it was specifically his fault.
Jonathan Slater, who was permanent secretary at the Department for Education until he was sacked by Boris Johnson in 2020, said the department had wanted to refurbish or rebuild 300 to 400 schools a year but that the Treasury, when Sunak was chancellor, cut that to 50. Now prime minister, he rebutted this allegation in the weirdest way: “Actually one of the first things I did as chancellor, in my first spending review in 2020, was to announce a new 10-year school rebuilding programme for 500 schools.” He then kindly added, for anyone whose numeracy is compromised by historic failures of the Department for Education: “That equates to about 50 schools a year that will be refurbished or rebuilt.”
What Sunak is claiming here is that, far from being a non-school-refurbishing chancellor, he immediately announced funding for refurbishing hundreds of schools. The only trouble is that, in terms of sheer tedious numbers, his and Slater’s assertions are identical: 50 schools a year. The difference of opinion is only over whether that should be referred to as “only 50 schools a year” or “a whopping 500 schools a decade”. What do you think? If I personally had to refurbish 50 schools a year, that would feel like absolutely loads. A ridiculous burden on my time and resources. But then I’m not a G7 economy with a population of 67 million.
It all depends on how many schools there are in total, I suppose. Here Sunak has been inadvertently helpful. In trying to point out that the 147 currently affected are making a piffling impact on the country as a whole, he said: “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.” Ninety-five per cent – very reassuring. Though that’s down from 100% a fortnight ago, back when we were basking in the illusion that the nation’s educational centres were all structurally sound.
So: 22,000 schools in England of which 50 get “refurbished or rebuilt” every year. By my calculation that means Sunak’s policy is for every school to get a revamp once every 440 years. Whether it needs it or not. It’s right to be sparing with the taxpayer’s money, and we all know that buildings can remain standing for hundreds, sometimes thousands, of years almost unaided. The pyramids in Egypt, for example. Stonehenge. The Tower of London is now closing in on a millennium. Though the Palace of Westminster, mostly completed around 1860, isn’t doing so well and is having its refurbishment a cheeky 280 years early. And it feels like a particularly flawed approach for the maintenance of buildings constructed out of aerated concrete because we now know that only lasts 30 years. Four-and-a-bit centuries is a long time to keep using a building after the roof has already fallen in.
The education secretary, Gillian Keegan, took a more aggressive approach to evading blame. She berated ITV News for not telling her that she’d “done a fucking good job because everyone else has sat on their arse and done nothing”. In my view, it was naive of her to go on television in the expectation of expletive-ridden praise. She also slagged off those headteachers who have not returned their government questionnaires about what materials they reckon their schools are made of. They need to “get off their backsides” – stop worrying about the new term, new pupils, new teachers and syllabuses and timetables and lessons, and do a quick course in identifying types of concrete.
Most surprisingly of all, she declared that “it’s not the job of the Department for Education” to make sure school buildings are safe. That responsibility lies with “local authorities and local academy trusts”. If she’s right about that, then why is it providing money for even 50 schools a year to be refurbished? Just to be nice? If it’s not the department’s responsibility, why has it always been provided with a budget to do it?
This crisis has obviously been brewing for decades but the incoming Cameron government’s decision, in 2010, to scrap Labour’s £55bn Building Schools for the Future scheme feels like the point when it might have escalated. But cuts were the order of the day and they have been ever since. That’s the Tory ethos: they cut billions with the alacrity that Logan Roy and family add them to takeover bids. It’s all just numbers. To the current administration, money spent by the state is, almost by definition, money wasted. So, in 2020, as Sunak poured nearly £1bn into private sector pockets via “Eat out to help out”, he slashed hundreds of millions from the budget for repairing schools.
It’s like the people in government don’t believe in government. They see the money it all costs and they can’t stand it: the hard-earned profits of commerce being poured down the drain by whingeing civil servants. They can’t equate public money spent with any meaningful object other than an aircraft carrier. Everything else is a failure of belt-tightening rigour. They hate the state and they’re impatient with detail. They slash and they slash and it makes them feel strong and ideological. And then, one by one, the schools fall down.
David Mitchell’s new book, Unruly, is published on 28 September
