Concrete crisis in British schools impacts families, students

LONDON – Ms Helen Burness was working from home last Monday when the e-mail arrived. In less than 24 hours, her nine-year-old daughter was set to return to school after the long summer break.

The e-mail was from the principal. The school had been forced to shut, the official wrote apologetically, because of concerns about unsafe concrete in its buildings.

Ms Burness’ daughter Marigold has a rare chromosomal disorder and attends a specialist speech and language school for children with complex learning needs. She had been both nervous and excited about starting the new school year, and her parents had spent weeks helping her prepare.

Ms Burness’ heart sank as she realised she would have to tell Marigold that the plan had changed – with no idea when the issue might be resolved.

“It’s been kind of in free fall, really,” said Ms Burness, 47, of how the week was playing out. “And how much longer will it be?”

By Thursday morning, Ms Burness and her husband, who both run their own businesses, were juggling parenting duties and their jobs, unable to find specialist childcare at short notice. On Friday, the school said classes would resume this week, but added that some rooms would be inaccessible and adjustments would have to be made.

Britain’s Conservative government has faced acute criticism since the announcement on Aug 31 that more than 100 schools would have to close buildings because of the presence of reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete, or Raac, a bubbly, lightweight material known to pose a risk of sudden collapse.

The crisis intensified after it became clear that senior government officials had ignored repeated warnings about the material, with a former Department for Education official accusing Prime Minister Rishi Sunak of refusing to rebuild more schools while he was chancellor of the Exchequer, despite being told of a “critical risk to life”. (Mr Sunak said it was “completely and utterly wrong” to hold him responsible for the funding shortfall.)

About 10,000 students had their start of the year delayed, according to government data, and in an unwelcome reminder of pandemic lockdowns, thousands of children were moved either to fully remote learning or to a mix of in-person and remote learning.

Raac (pronounced rack) was used in the construction of hundreds of buildings in Britain between the 1950s and mid-1990s, including schools, hospitals, and theatres. Its lightness made it a popular choice for the flat roofs common in the postwar building boom.

But concerns about the material, which has a lifespan of about 30 years, date back decades. In 1995, Mr Victor Whitworth, a structural engineer in Somerset, in south-west England, wrote to the journal of the Institution of Structural Engineers: “Fellow engineers, beware!” after inspecting cracks in a school roof that contained Raac.

A school roof collapsed in Kent, in south-eastern England, in 2018. The ceiling crumbled over a weekend and nobody was hurt, but the dangers were clear. A 2019 safety alert recommended that all Raac planks installed before 1980 should be replaced. In 2021, a government agency issued a safety briefing stating that “Raac is now life-expired and liable to collapse.”

The trouble was in securing the money to make repairs. And the eventual impact could be seen at two neighbouring schools in Southend-on-Sea, about 64km east of London, last Wednesday afternoon.

Small children in crisp white shirts lined up outside Eastwood Primary School, chatting and giggling with classmates as they waited to be picked up by parents.

At Kingsdown School next door, the grounds were preternaturally quiet. The only signs of life were two workers climbing a ladder onto the flat roof of a building.

Another specialist school for children with complex learning needs, Kingsdown, was also set to begin classes this week, but shut days before the start of the school year because of Raac. Ms Lydia Hyde, a local councillor in Southend from the opposition Labour Party, said that there was deep frustration from the local authorities, parents, and teachers that action was not taken earlier.

“For some of these children, it’s their first school term,” Ms Hyde said. “All of the children were excited, planning and preparing for school, and then it just didn’t happen.”

Mr Sunak defended the government’s approach, on Sept 6, saying it had acted “decisively.” But critics say that for years, Conservative-led governments slashed spending on infrastructure.

Dr Caroline Slocock, the director of Civil Exchange, a think-tank, and a former senior civil servant under both Labour and Conservative governments, pointed to policy shifts as far back as 2010 that contributed to the current crisis.

In the late 1990s through the early 2000s she advised Mr Gordon Brown, former Labour chancellor of the Exchequer and later prime minister, on how to strengthen rules to encourage long-term investment. She helped design “a one-way valve” to stop capital budgets from being slashed to meet short-term spending pressures.

But in 2010, after the Conservatives came to power in a coalition government with the centrist Liberal Democrats, the valve was removed, and a protracted period of government austerity began.

Mr George Osborne, who served as chancellor of the Exchequer from 2010 to 2016, constrained spending drastically, an approach that Dr Slocock said would ultimately cost the country more in the long run as critical infrastructure problems escalated.

“In a way, it’s a symbol of what you call broken Britain – or in this case, crumbling Britain,” she said.

“There has been over a decade of not recognising the problem. And in not dealing with it, it keeps getting worse and worse.” NYTIMES