More than half of English schools that are so dilapidated they are at risk of partial closure were refused money under the government’s school rebuilding scheme, Department for Education (DfE) statistics show.

Peter Walker www.theguardian.com 

Amid mounting concerns about a wider apparent neglect of the schools estate in recent years, beyond the immediate alarm about crumbling concrete panels, it emerged that of 500 rebuilt schools planned for England over 10 years from 2020, just four were completed in 2021.

In another development, the Guardian has learned that the Treasury vetoed a push by the Department for Education (DfE) to use a £1bn underspend to rebuild hundreds of schools during Liz Truss’s government.

The apparent disinclination of Treasury ministers to invest in new school buildings carries significant political risk for Sunak, after it emerged that a DfE plan to rebuild as many as 400 schools a year was slashed to 50 when he was chancellor.

The schools rebuilding programme is not directly linked to the current turmoil over schools forced to close classrooms or buildings because of increased concerns about crumbling reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete (Raac), although some of the work will be to replace Raac-constructed blocks.

Under the most recent full data published by the DfE, of 1,105 schools that applied to be rebuilt, 300 had been selected and 797 refused, with eight dropping out.

Of those turned down, 356 applied under a DfE-set metric called “exceptional case”, which means the school leaders believe the condition of their blocks is “so severe as to risk imminent closure, or a block is already closed”.

Schools can also apply as an exceptional case because the issues needing remedy can be solved only through a complete rebuild, or the school has not had a structural survey under a DfE programme to assess the state of the buildings.

In total, 267 exceptional cases were among those given funding, meaning the success rate for the category was only 43%.

Sunak and Gillian Keegan, the education secretary, have come under pressure about the rate of school rebuilds after a spate of sudden failures in Raac, the lightweight concrete intended to be used for only 30 years, meant some students were forced to begin the term from home or in temporary classrooms and cabins.

The decision to rebuild at a rate of 50 a year was made when Sunak was chancellor, and came despite a DfE submission for funding to the Treasury asking for between 300 and 400 a year to be approved due to “a critical risk to life” from Raac and other issues.

Separately, the Guardian was told that when Kit Malthouse was education secretary in Truss’s short-lived government he tried to reallocate a £1bn underspend in the DfE’s capital budget for school rebuilding and repairs, believing it could cover about 700 schools.

Some of these were affected by Raac, but others had other reasons for needing urgent refurbishment.

According to government sources, despite discussions between the DfE and Treasury over the following few weeks, the idea was not taken forward.

After Truss quit and Sunak replaced Malthouse with Keegan, it was decided that about £500m worth of capital underspend would be used instead to fund energy efficiency improvements to schools.

Keegan has become a particular focus for criticism over the current crisis, particularly after her complaint on Monday that “everyone else has sat on their arse” while she tried to fix the problem. On Tuesday, she risked angering schools by telling those responsible for returning questionnaires about possible Raac to “get off their backsides”.

Anger at Keegan is growing among some senior Tories. One called her “politically stupid” for not “pitch-rolling” MPs before the announcement some schools would have to close fully or partially. They added: “Keegan has been over-promoted and is emblematic of this government’s approach, which is to blame people for not understanding why they’re right.”

Downing Street has defended the pace of school rebuilds, saying 50 a year was around the average for the previous decade, and that other work was being carried out beyond the school rebuilding programme.

Sunak’s official spokesperson said it was incorrect to say that only four schools were rebuilt in 2021, and that when various schemes were considered, 72 were completed that year.

“The numbers do vary, but they obviously cover a number of schemes, just because of the way they have been introduced,” he said.

On the high proportion of “exceptional case” schools refused funding, a DfE spokesperson said the criteria for decisions was established after consultation with councils and others, and that so far 400 of the planned 500 schools had been selected.

They added: “Where there is a significant issue with a building that cannot be managed within local resources, we provide additional support on a case-by-case basis.”

A Department for Education spokesperson said after consultations, all those schools that applied for funding with “exceptional need” verified against the criteria were included.

“That means the schools with buildings in the worst condition are already being addressed,” they said. The spokesperson added: “The department has taken action to select 400 schools with the greatest need, with 100 more yet to be confirmed. Where there is a significant issue with a building that cannot be managed within local resources, we provide additional support on a case-by-case basis.”

At least 13 schools confirmed to have reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete (RAAC) had funding to rebuild withdrawn in 2010, the BBC has found.

By Daniel Wainwright & Lucy Gilder www.bbc.co.uk

They had been approved for rebuilding under a Labour scheme, later scrapped by the Conservative-led government.

School buildings have been closed because potentially dangerous RAAC has been found.

The analysis raises questions about whether schools could have been helped far earlier with government investment.

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is likely to face strong criticism from Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer in the Commons on Wednesday, marking the first prime minister’s questions since the story broke and the summer recess.

Labour says Mr Sunak’s past decisions on funding when he was chancellor have led to the disruption, but the PM has insisted claims he was to blame for the problems were “utterly wrong”.

The Labour scheme – Building Schools for the Future (BSF) – was a £55bn project to renew every secondary school in England, rebuilding half of them and refurbishing the rest.

It was ditched by the coalition government (which launched its own school building scheme in 2014).

The then education secretary Michael Gove said BSF was characterised by “massive overspends, tragic delays, botched construction projects and needless bureaucracy”.

There were questions about the value for money in the project, but the structural issues for the schools applying were real.

More than 700 projects were shelved. Mr Gove’s department published a list of schools affected in 2010.

This list stated which ones had work “stopped” but did not detail what the work was. Projects that had already had their finances agreed were able to continue.

Geoff Barton, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, called the crumbling concrete crisis a “national scandal”.

“This analysis shows that these 13 schools would not now be facing the huge disruption caused by the RAAC crisis if the government had not pulled the plug on the building schools for the future programme,” he said.

“Instead we have an £11.4 billion backlog of repairs and remedial work required and the chickens have come home to roost over this neglect of school buildings.”

BBC Verify looked at the schools which were listed as having their building projects “stopped” and then checked these names against the list of schools affected by RAAC, published by the BBC.

Thirteen schools, which had their building work cancelled in 2010, are on the list of schools with potentially dangerous RAAC concrete.

• Aston Manor Academy – Birmingham
• Ferryhill School – County Durham
• Carmel College – Darlington
• The Ellen Wilkinson School for Girls – Ealing, London
• The Billericay School – Essex
• The Bromfords School – Essex
• The Appleton School – Essex
• The Gilberd School – Essex
• The Thomas Lord Audley School – Essex
• Thurstable School Sports College and Sixth Form Centre – Essex
• Wood Green Academy – Sandwell, West Midlands
• London Oratory School – Hammersmith and Fulham, London
• Holy Family Catholic School, Bradford

We double-checked the names of the schools as they were in the 2010 list and as they are now in the official 2023 schools census data.

Each school has a special individual registration number, which in most cases stays the same even if the name of the school changes, such as when it becomes an academy.

The Bromfords School in Essex, which missed out on BSF funding, was on a list of schools that had successfully applied for the Condition Improvement Fund (CIF) in 2022-23, some of which was to tackle RAAC.

The London Oratory School in Fulham had RAAC removed during work on its DT Block and Sixth Form common room, but it is still present in roofing panels elsewhere on the school site. The school was listed in the CIF data as needing to do “urgent RAAC deck removal”.

Daniel Kebede, general secretary for the National Education Union, claimed there wouldn’t be RAAC in a single secondary school if “BSF had been allowed to continue”.

“It has in my opinion been calculated neglect”, he said.

Most of the 13 schools identified by the BBC as having missed out on BSF funding have had some building work investment in the intervening years, according to reports in local media.

This ranges from refurbishment of a dining hall and toilets to new art and sports blocks.

We contacted eleven of the schools involved.

We shared our findings with the Department for Education (DfE) and asked them to comment.

A DfE spokesperson said: “We committed to rebuilding 500 schools over the next decade as part of the Schools Rebuilding Programme and we are on track to deliver that.

“That is on top of 520 schools already delivered since 2015 under the Priority Schools Building Programme.

“The School Rebuilding Programme is in its initial stages of delivery and there will be an increase in the number of projects beginning construction in the next year.”

This time at the start of Covid.

Downing Street showed an “ostrich, head-in-the-sand mentality” towards Covid in early 2020 as Boris Johnson’s government instead focused on subjects such as Brexit, a former health minister has said.

Peter Walker www.theguardian.com 

Speaking to the Institute for Government as part of its ongoing series of in-depth interviews with former ministers about their time in office, James Bethell also said officials did not want him to discuss the potential economic impacts of Covid policies and would delete this from his speeches.

Asked about the health department’s interaction with other arms of government, Lord Bethell, who was a whip before becoming a junior health minister, said it could be “pretty turbulent”.

He said: “No 10 didn’t want to prioritise the pandemic in early 2020, even though the evidence was mounting – there was a post-election, ostrich, head-in-the-sand mentality, which I saw again around the invasion of Ukraine.

“Its priority, and what we were told many times, was Brexit and levelling up. ‘We have to deliver Brexit, so could your pandemic quietly go and mind your own business, please,’ we were told. So we had several weeks of this brushing off, and then they switched into it eventually. After that we got a lot of erratic dipping in. In Yiddish, it’s called ‘kibitzing’: erratic and ill-informed interference.”

While noting that as a junior minister his personal interactions with Downing Street were limited, Bethell said that from his point of view “coordination within government got a lot better” after Dominic Cummings, Boris Johnson’s chief adviser, left No 10 in November 2020.

Separately in the interview, Bethell said he was never given any advice about the economic impact of Covid policies, calling this “a mistake”. He said: “I was really surprised that we never got any kind of economic briefing. I asked for it many times, and I wrote speeches to give in the Lords where I articulated the economic thinking that I was personally working from.

“But my officials intervened, quite reasonably and quite correctly, and said: ‘It is not your role as the health minister to try to make up the government’s economic policy. The Treasury will go mad if you try to do that, we will not get the speech cleared by their officials, and by the way it’s neither smart nor right.’ And they had a point, so that stuff got deleted.”

In another recollection, Bethell said he was first asked if he wanted to become a minister in 2019 when he was at the Womad festival and was phoned by the then chief whip in the Lords.

“I was in a really great mood, feeling warm about the world, he made a very charming pitch and [I] immediately said yes,” Bethell said. “I am not sure I fully thought through all the implications.”

Richard Foord, MP for Tiverton & Honiton 

One of the most important duties of a government is to protect its citizens. This includes the conventional ways we think of, such as providing a well-equipped armed forces and responsive local police force, but also ensuring that public buildings like schools and hospitals are maintained properly.

This issue has come to the forefront in recent days with the revelations about the true scale of the problem posed by RAAC (Reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete). This is a lighter form of concrete, often used in construction during the 1950s and 60s, that has a much shorter lifespan than regular concrete.

As a result, buildings built using this material degrade faster and need replacing much sooner. This has reached literal breaking point this week as the government has finally accepted the huge danger posed due to the number of schools still using buildings built with this material.

Over the weekend it was confirmed that 156 schools have been found to have buildings contain RAAC, of which 104 require urgent repair work. And on Monday it was further revealed that 5% of all schools – roughly 1200 – are affected by this growing crisis.

We’ve known for years that this is a growing problem as classrooms across the country, and here in Devon, are literally falling apart around pupils. The urgent rebuilding of schools like Tiverton High School and Tipton St John have long been promised, yet we are still waiting to see spades in the ground.

What is even more shocking is that the Government knew about this. The former permanent secretary at the Department for Education said on Monday that officials warned back in 2018 of a “critical risk to life” from crumbling school buildings, but requests for additional funding were ignored.

Rishi Sunak may claim that he’s not to blame, but that’s simply not true. Earlier this year his Conservative government cut £900 million from the education capital spending budget, which is spent ensuring classrooms are safe.

This crisis perfectly sums up the approach of this Conservative government. They are content to sit back and take us for granted, letting these issues fester until they reach crisis point – then they scramble to pick up the pieces.

Our children and communities deserve far better than this reckless boom and bust approach.

Nine months ago, with great fanfare, Simon Jupp amongst others announced that, at last, Tipton St John Primary rebuild had been included in the school rebuilding programme. [In 2015 the Environment Agency (EA) declared that there is a ‘risk to life’ of the children attending the hub and that it must be rebuilt outside of the flood zone.]

There is now an urgent crisis in schools across the country needing fixing to stop pupils being crushed by crumbly concrete. Ministers have said that they will “do what it takes” to fix the problem.  However, the treasury has made it clear that “no new money” is available.

So inevitably, it looks to Owl, as though there will have to be some radical re-prioritising and rescheduling of the capital expenditure programme within the Education Department.

In these circumstances the easiest “savings” to make are on those projects not yet committed, even though they may have been scheduled or, indeed, “promised”.

We need a clear statement that Tipton Primary will not be affected by the current crisis.  

Gillian Keegan tells teachers to ‘get off backsides’ and answer Raac survey

The education secretary, Gillian Keegan, has angered teachers a day after a sweary outburst landed her in trouble, this time claiming headteachers who had not responded to a survey about whether they were affected by crumbling concrete should “get off their backsides”.

Ben Quinn www.theguardian.com 

Her comments in a radio interview came a day after she was forced to apologise after being caught swearing on camera while expressing frustration about the crisis surrounding reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete (Raac) in schools, claiming that “everyone else has sat on their arse” while she tried to fix the problem.

Keegan told Jeremy Vine on BBC Radio 2 on Tuesday: “The annoying bit, and this was probably a bit of my frustration yesterday, is despite asking since March 2020, there’s 5% of schools or responsible bodies that have not responded to the survey. Now hopefully all this publicity will make them get off their backsides.

“But what I would like them to do is to respond because I want to be the secretary of state that knows exactly in every school where there is Raac and takes action.”

She added: “We’ve written to them quite a few times and we’ve also set up a call centre to phone them up to ask them to do it and they still haven’t. So we have written to them yesterday and given them until the end of the week.”

In response, the National Education Union (NEU) said that laying any responsibility for the concrete crisis at the door of schools was “outrageous”.

Daniel Kebede, the general secretary of the NEU, said: “It is outrageous of the education secretary to lay any responsibility for the Raac crisis at the door of schools. The fact is that the Department for Education has dragged its heels over many years on this issue.

“The government has failed to show leadership on this issue for very many years.”

… the tax on champagne. Cheers! – Owl

Watch the video on “X” here

A Tory rebellion in the House of Lords could thwart Michael Gove’s plans to rip up pollution laws for housebuilders in England.

If the Lords were to pass an amendment, the bill would go back to commons where the Government might seek to reinstate their original amendment. This would test Simon Jupp’s claim “I would never vote to pollute our water”. – Owl

Helena Horton www.theguardian.com 

The former minister Zac Goldsmith, who recently quit the government over what he termed Rishi Sunak’s “apathy” over the environment, and Sir John Randall, a former environmental adviser to No 10, have signed an amendment laid by the Duke of Wellington that would nullify the government’s plans.

Last week, Gove and the environment secretary, Thérèse Coffey, announced plans to amend the levelling up bill, which would undo EU-derived rules stopping housebuilders from polluting sensitive areas. It would essentially force planning officials to pretend sewage pollution from new developments does not exist when considering applications for sensitive areas such as the Norfolk Broads and Lake District.

The current rules aim to sustain “nutrient neutrality”, meaning no more nutrient pollution such as nitrates and phosphates enter important habitats in sewage from new housing. These nutrients choke rivers, filling them with algae and killing the life within.

The duke’s amendment, which will be debated in the coming days, would “delete … the requirement placed on a local authority to assume that nutrients in wastewater would not cause harm to the environment”. This would effectively undo the government’s amendment and maintain the protections for rivers.

Goldsmith is understood to be lobbying his fellow peers to back the duke’s amendment. Other signatories include the Green party’s Jenny Jones, and Kate Parminter of the Liberal Democrats.

The Office for Environmental Protection, set up to replace the EU as a watchdog for environmental regulation in the UK, has said these rules are a regression in environmental standards and asked Coffey and Gove to appear in front of the House of Commons to explain themselves. Those who hoped Labour would undo this “regression” when in power were disappointed when the then shadow levelling up secretary, Lisa Nandy, indicated she supported the government position. It is unclear whether her replacement, Angela Rayner, does too.

The Lib Dem environment spokesperson, Tim Farron, has reported the solicitor general and the prime minister to the ethics adviser for a breach of the ministerial code, claiming they have misled parliament by saying they would not degrade the environment.

Farron said: “The prime minister’s contradiction on environmental protections is not only a grave concern for the environment, but also potentially a serious breach of the ministerial code.

“Ministers are expected to provide accurate information. We need an urgent investigation into this to get to the bottom of whether the prime minister and solicitor general have knowingly misled the House of Commons.”

A government spokesperson said: “We’ve always been clear we will never compromise our high standards and we are fully committed to our ambitious and legally binding commitments on the environment. The reforms we’ve set out will see us tackle pollution at source in a way that these legacy laws never addressed through a significant package to restore waterways and leave our environment in a better state than we found it.

“This will see us more than offset the negligible impact of new homes on levels of nutrients, by doubling the investment for Natural England to tackle nutrients, bringing this to £280m, drawing up bespoke plans to restore nature in the most affected areas, and providing more support than ever to help farmers reduce pollution from essential agriculture.”