School teacher Orlando Hill looks at the context that created the building crisis in schools.

Once again, the Tory government has thrown education into chaos. Just a few days before the start of a new academic year 104 schools across England have been told that some or all of their buildings are unsafe and cannot be used. This is because they have been built with a lightweight material known as reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete (RAAC). This form of building material was commonly used in schools, colleges, and other building construction from the 1950s until the mid-1990s. There are a total of 156 education settings with confirmed RAAC.

The whole episode is symptomatic of chronic and frankly intentional neglect in the sector. The government cannot hide behind the mask of ignorance. They have acted at the eleventh hour because a beam collapsed in a supposedly safe building. But they knew there was a problem and they sat on their hands, for years. In 2018, the Department for Education published a warning note about RAAC with the Local Government Association, after a staffroom collapsed with no warning. The government has been investigating ever since with zero sense of urgency. 

In June, the UK’s public spending warned that one in ten students were in buildings that required rebuilding or refurbishment after years of under-investment.

The Tories are in fact directly responsible for the terrible state of school buildings. In the first days of the Tory and Lib Dem coalition government in the summer of 2010, the then Secretary for Education Michael Gove cancelled Labour’s £55bn Building Schools for the Future programme. Hundreds of secondary schools, which had plans for rebuilding, were left empty handed. Even then there were reports of the leaking roofs and dire state of schools.

The new NEU general secretary Daniel Kebede is clear that the blame lies with “this government whose perpetual lack of investment in school buildings has let our school estate in such a dire state of disrepair.” Paul Whiteman, general secretary of the NAHT school leaders’ union, is clear the government knew how critical the situation was, “the NAHT has repeatedly raised concerns about these buildings for a long time now, so while this news is shocking, sadly it is not hugely surprising. What we are seeing here are the very real consequences of a decade of swingeing cuts to spending on school buildings.”

One of the main reasons that teachers took strike action in the last academic year was the inadequate funding of schools. Behind the anger over pay lay a profound sense that our young people are being failed by systemic underfunding. The National Education Union (NEU) has grown by over 70,000 in little more than six months as a direct result of industrial action. It is now the third largest industry specific union in the country.

The widespread popular support for the teachers’ action, despite the inconvenience it caused, shows that there is a broad understanding of the crisis in education. But the government continues to ignore the problems. Even when buildings are under the threat of collapsing the government has asked schools to cover the costs of emergency accommodation from their squeezed budgets. As Daniel Kebede, General Secretary of the NEU pointed out, “to add insult to injury the Government states in its guidance (1) that it will not be covering the costs of emergency temporary accommodation or additional transport. The government is therefore expecting schools to pay the additional costs of its own shocking neglect of school building.”

The whole sorry affair underlines the need for a continuing, militant campaign for decent funding for education. The momentum and involvement from the strikes needs to be built on to fight for a decent future for teachers and students based on a real assessment of their needs, not on the austerity dogma of this government of the rich.