Thousands of children in the U.K. won’t be returning to their classrooms this week because their schools are at risk of collapse from crumbling concrete.
More than 100 schools were told last week — days before the start of the new school year — to shut some or all of their buildings because they contain a type of lightweight, air-filled concrete widely used in construction between the 1950s and the 1990s.
British Education Secretary Gillian Keegan added on Monday that hundreds more school buildings might also be unsafe due to weak concrete.
School officials are scrambling to find classroom space in nearby facilities or resorting to online instruction after the government’s last-minute directive, sparked when three schools previously thought to be safe suffered collapses over the summer.
The government says the “vast majority” of schools are not affected by problems with reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete (RAAC). The material is lighter and less expensive than standard reinforced concrete but is also weaker, with a useful life of about 30 years.
“I want to reassure families that this is not a return to the dark days of school lockdowns,” Keegan said in a statement on Sunday. Of the 156 schools and colleges that have been confirmed so far to be structurally unsafe, she said, 52 have “had mitigation work put in place.”
The government says the total number of affected schools is likely to be in the hundreds but not the thousands.
The news is a start-of-term headache for Prime Minister Rishi Sunak as he scrambles to shore up flagging support for the governing Conservative Party ahead of a national election next year.
“I know the timing is frustrating, but I want to give people a sense of the scale of what we are grappling with here,” Sunak told broadcasters. “There are around 22,000 schools in England, and the important thing to know is that we expect that 95 per cent of those schools won’t be impacted by this.”
A former senior civil servant in the education department, Jonathan Slater, said Monday that in 2021, Sunak, who was then Britain’s treasury chief, had halved the number of schools to be refurbished each year from 100 to 50 — far fewer than the 300 to 400 Slater said were needed.
Sunak said that allegation was “completely and utterly wrong.” He said refurbishing about 50 schools a year was in line with what past governments had done.
The use of RAAC was not limited to schools. Courts, hospitals and other public buildings in the U.K. were also built using aerated concrete, often for roofs.
Labour Party education spokesperson Bridget Phillipson said the government was “still not being upfront about the scale of what we are facing” and “ministers need to get a grip on this.”