Amid a mounting political and educational crisis over schools built with reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete (Raac) from the 1950s to 1990s, the education secretary, Gillian Keegan, said it was still not known how many might be affected, and how many might need to close, with engineers still to inspect more sites.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Rishi Sunak refused to properly fund a school rebuilding programme when he was chancellor, despite officials presenting evidence that there was “a critical risk to life” from crumbling concrete panels, the Department for Education’s former head civil servant has said.
Keegan insisted the DfE had taken “a very cautious approach” to the issues, and that parents should be reassured that “the vast majority of children will be going back today”.
In a damning interview on Monday morning, Slater said two surveys of Raac in schools had uncovered the extent of work needed on a building method supposed to be time-limited to about 30 years of use, with a risk in some cases of sudden and catastrophic failure beyond this.
While he was permanent secretary, in 2018, a concrete block fell from the roof of a primary school, Slater added, “so it wasn’t just a risk.
Munira Wilson, the party’s education spokesperson, said: “This bombshell revelation shows the blame for this concrete crisis lies firmly at Rishi Sunak’s door.
Speaking earlier on Sky News, Keegan said the DfE “isn’t strictly responsible for the [school] buildings”, as they are maintained by councils or academy chains, but that it would fund any work from the department’s existing budget.
The original article contains 651 words, the summary contains 205 words. Saved 69%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
One point I’d make from an earlier thread on the topic – it sounds like RAAC panels were used in a number of countries. It may be that the UK is particularly affected due to having quite a bit of rain – it’s moisture that does the damage.
But it may also be that the UK is being relatively-proactive. Almost all the articles I see talking about this are in the UK. I wasn’t able to find articles elsewhere saying “yeah, we looked into this, but it’s not an issue in our country because X”.
We don’t use it much in the US, but it looks like there is at least some out there, and I haven’t seen articles here saying “yeah, this is what the Brits are worried about, and we identified the buildings where it was present here and have determined that it’s not a problem”.
And use of the stuff is apparently common in mainland Europe, and I see no (English-language) news articles on it there.
So it may well be that the British response – whether it should have been faster or not – is, in fact, the response that’s actually moving the most-quickly.
Heh. Well, even if one takes a really hard-cynical position like that, it’d probably be preferable to have it fixed than ignored. I’m saying that the UK isn’t unique in using it, but is unusual in the attention being paid to it.
predicted lifetime of 30 years
My understanding is that the reduced 30 year lifetime was something determined in the 1990s after the material had already been used in construction for some decades, that the short estimate was based on the rate of degradation observed. That is, the basic problem wasn’t people intentionally choosing a material that they knew to have a short lifetime, but in a new, experimental material having some serious issues that weren’t originally recognized when it started being used.
The Tories are a “critical risk to life”
At risk of spamming the link; Mr Slater talked about it on the Today programme here at 1:12:53
