More than 100 schools in England have closed partly or completely because they are built with a type of concrete that crumbles. At least 35 are in the same situation in Scotland. The rest of the country is now checking the walls, ceilings, floors and beams of their schools to take the same measures for a material that degrades and has already exceeded its useful life.
Thousands of students across the country start the course later, are hosted by other centers or are teaching online. Rishi Sunak’s Government published this Wednesday the official list of the schools affected so far: 156, including 52 where the facilities have already been closed and 104 that are in the process of doing so. The number may be much higher when the inspections are over, and this does not include private schools, which are not among those analyzed by the Government, but which are also closing after detecting the same dangerous concrete.
And it’s not just the schools.
The national health system has sent an alert to its 224 local health authorities so that hospitals and health centers in England make plans to evacuate their facilities in the event of a collapse. There are 19 authorities that are considered “priority” due to a more imminent danger. Fear of collapse has already caused some patients suffering from obesity to be treated as a precaution on ground floors.
Parliament buildings are also now being reviewed to clarify whether there are also parts built with the type of concrete used in schools, hospitals and other public buildings between the 1950s and 1990s across the country.
Autoclaved cellular concrete (RAAC) is a prefabricated, lightweight material that was widely used in the United Kingdom in the second half of the 20th century due to its speed of installation and cheaper price for roofs, walls and floors. In 1996, a government agency for building safety warned of excessive cracks in roofs made of this concrete panels and warned that this material had a maximum life of 30 years.
Since then, numerous reports have documented the risks and called for inspections. In July 2018, a roof at a primary school in Gravesend, Kent, south-east of London, suddenly collapsed on a Saturday night; There were no victims because it was empty. The roof was 29 years old and the damage forced the temporary closure of the school. Since then, several ministries have issued alerts calling for inspections and caution with this material.
On August 16, the national regulator for Health and Safety at Work published its most forceful announcement: “The useful life of RAAC has ended. It is liable to collapse with little or no warning. If you are responsible for the management, maintenance or alteration of public buildings you need to know if your buildings have RAAC, and act appropriately to ensure that the buildings are safe.
The current alert comes from incidents this summer due to collapses in schools and other buildings that had this concrete but were not considered risky. Nick Gibbs, the Secretary of State for Education, explained to the BBC that the fall of a beam of this type of concrete that was not in obvious bad condition was the trigger for the announcement of the partial or total closure before the start of the course: “It “What we discovered over the summer was that there were a number of cases, in schools and other buildings, in England and outside England, where RAAC that had been considered low risk had become dangerous.”
Just a few days before returning to school, “a beam collapsed that had no sign that it posed a critical risk and was considered safe,” according to the politician. Thus the Government announced that schools have to stop using buildings or areas that have this concrete.
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak defends that “the majority” of schools are able to accommodate students as he faces yet another crisis for the unpopular Conservative Government.
The Minister of Education, Gillian Keegan, complained on television – while she had the microphone on and was in front of the cameras although she did not realize that the recording was continuing – that no one was telling her “what a fucking good job” she was doing while “others didn’t move their asses.” The minister then apologized for her words.
Keegan has also been criticized for not interrupting her holidays in Spain when schools were ordered to close. She claims that she was working “remotely”. According to the British press, she has an apartment in Madrid and a house in Marbella, but a spokesperson did not specify where she was.
The problem goes back a long way and has been aggravated by the 13 years of cuts by conservative governments that have affected regional and local authorities, and have even led to the declaration of bankruptcy of city councils. The latest to declare itself in “financial stress” and suspend payments beyond essential services has been Birmingham City Council, a city of more than a million inhabitants.
Schools have been asking for years for repairs and in some cases the complete reconstruction of buildings from the 60s whose concrete is now considered dangerous and accumulate multiple problems, including short circuits, poor ventilation and leaks.
A report on the state of 22,000 schools in England published by the Government in 2021 estimated that 11.4 billion pounds (more than 13 billion euros) were needed in urgent repairs, half of them for buildings built between 1960 and 1980.
In 2010, David Cameron’s Conservative Government eliminated the school reconstruction project that the Labor governments had started, which involved investing £55 billion (€64 billion) to renovate or rebuild all secondary schools in England.
Sunak defends his party’s decisions by ensuring that the majority of schools affected by the closures are primary schools. However, some of the hardest-hit schools are now among those that suffered the cuts. For example, plans to rebuild at least 13 schools with this type of concrete that are now closed were canceled by the Tories in 2010, according to a BBC investigation.
Since the conservatives came to power they have cut the budget for school maintenance and reconstruction, even ignoring their own Ministry of Education. In 2020, this department asked to spend the equivalent of 6.1 billion euros per year on the worn-out structures and the Treasury approved 3,600. In 2021, under a progressive plan, Education asked to make repairs to 200 schools a year instead of 100 then, and Sunak, then chancellor, approved doing only 50 a year.
Now, the current Treasury minister, Jeremy Hunt, says that the Government will spend “whatever it takes” to fix the schools. But many do not even know how vulnerable they are.
“What’s happening now is that we have school principals going crazy trying to identify concrete that looks like this instead of focusing on the development and education of children,” Geoff Barton complained on BBC radio. CEO of the Association of College and University Leaders. “It is a national scandal.”
The concrete crisis has focused on schools due to the start of the school year and emergency measures, but it affects many types of buildings.
Labor MP Meg Hillier, chair of a House of Commons committee on public accounts, wrote in the Times of her shock at discovering during a visit to public programs that “in a hospital staff only fix the roof when they and their tools have a certain weight” and “overweight patients must be treated on the ground floor because their weight combined with that of the medical equipment is too much to be safe.”
