MabelSpace is back from our Summer Holidays!
Welcome to our latest Friday MabePost! We know it's Tuesday, but we just couldn't wait to talk about Reinforced Autoclaved Aerated Concrete! We hope you enjoyed the summer more than Education Secretary Gillian Keegan. Keegan apologised after swearing on a "hot mic" while expressing frustration over coverage of the current Reinforced Autoclaved Aerated Concrete (RAAC) crisis. After some challenging questions from ITV News' Daniel Hewitt, Keegan asked:
"Does anyone ever say: 'You know what, you've done a f***ing good job, because everyone else has sat on their arse and done nothing?' No signs of that, no?"
The Guardian noted, "It was not clear whether Keegan was referring to her cabinet contemporaries, her predecessors or Hewitt." In a second interview, Keegan said her "sat on their arses" comment had been aimed at "nobody in particular". However, in a subsequent Radio Two interview, she claimed that a "bit of my frustration yesterday" was caused by building managers who had not responded to a DfE RAAC survey. Note the "bit of my frustration". Perhaps more frustration is reserved for her predecessors, her civil servants, the Treasury, or just the whole terrible situation. Consider the following timeline since 2010.
May 2010: Michael Gove is appointed Education Secretary. During his tenure, he more than halves capital expenditure on English schools. He halts Labour's "Building Schools for the Future Programme" (BSF), which planned to renew all English secondary schools by 2020. The replacement "Priority Schools Programme" will focus on those schools in the poorest condition. The DfE will centrally manage this with a much smaller team of civil servants (scrapping a layer of local bureaucracy that took responsibility for project delivery). However, the new programme is only fully operational at the end of Gove's tenure. In an unintended portend, the government explains that the delay was partly caused by the difficulties of Whitehall discovering where the poorest condition buildings in England actually were.
July 2014: Gove is replaced by Nicky Morgan, who, after witnessing Gove's travails, naturally sticks to the new plan. Good news: the school estate fades from the regular political news cycle!
July 2016: Morgan is replaced by Justine Greening. New build spending continues to fall.
January 2018: Greening is replaced by Damian Hinds. New build spending continues to fall.
July 2018: In Kent, a roof at Singlewell Primary School collapses over a weekend (image below). A Council officer notes, "There was no warning of any problems prior to Friday". Investigations find failed Reinforced Autoclaved Aerated Concrete (RAAC), a material used up until the 1990s.
December 2018: The Department for Education (DfE) advises schools of risks relating to RAAC.
May 2019: The Standing Committee on Structural Safety urges building owners to locate pre-1980 RAAC planks to assess their structural safety.
July 2019: Hinds is replaced by Gavin Williamson. 2020 expenditure on new school buildings will be around 25% of BSF's final year; it will stay at similar levels for the next three years. September 2021: Williamson is replaced by Nadihm Zahawi.
March 2022: The DfE sends a questionnaire to Local Authorities and Academy Trusts, asking them to report potential RAAC. Separately, the DfE reports an underspend of £469 million for 2021/22, "primarily due to slippage of school building programmes." The DfE blames difficult market conditions, though some question the DfE's project capacity, citing regular slippage on individual projects.
July 2022: Zahawi is replaced by Michelle Donelan. July 2022: Donelan is replaced by James Cleverly. September 2022: Cleverly is replaced by Kit Malthouse. September 2022: DfE-appointed surveyors begin assessing potential RAAC identified in questionnaire returns. If RAAC is confirmed, it is graded as "Non-critical" or "Critical". The latter status results in plans for remediation and the immediate closure of affected areas.
October 2022: Malthouse is replaced by Gillian Keegan. December 2022: No doubt prompted by returned RAAC questionnaires, Keegan's DfE's end-of-year report states, "There is a risk of collapse of one or more blocks in some schools…" July 2023: A National Audit Office (NAO) report states, "Following years of underinvestment... the DfE recognises significant safety concerns". The NAO lists numerous concerns. In one example, it notes that (following returned questionnaires) 572 schools might contain RAAC. Summer 2023: DfE's surveyors have now identified 52 RAAC "critical" school buildings. These buildings are closed for repairs or replacement, with many schools needing to make alternative arrangements for the autumn term.
August 2023: DfE is made aware of three recent examples of RAAC construction in other settings failing suddenly (that would likely have been judged as 'non-critical' using the DfE's method). One was a school, albeit in a "different jurisdiction". The new consensus is that RAAC can appear to be in good order to a surveyor but then fail suddenly (with potentially devastating results). September 2023: Following these findings, Keegan orders an additional 104 schools (previously assumed to be non-critical) to close their RAAC buildings. This is two to three working days before most would commence teaching the new term. Keegan knows she can expect little sympathy from ITV's Daniel Hewitt, who studiously holds those in power to account. Most likely, as she felt her frustration rising during his interview, she was thinking about the above timeline, missed opportunities to react, and a current lack of colleagues' (other ministers) support. This summer, a few of the above names will have spent time resting on the beach. However, summer is traditionally a busy time for an Education Secretary (exam results season, over-budget/late capital projects etc.). This year, the workload has likely been aggravated by ongoing trade union disputes. Keegan is understood to be a grown-up politician who works hard to command her brief. She made a tough decision to close 104 school buildings. Ex-minister Rory Stewart, on the podcast 'The Rest is Politics', notes that when making this call, she will have received little encouragement from Civil Servants (who can be slow to admit to a problem that's developed on their watch) or much support from the government's communications people (the 'optics' are terrible).
The rapid turnover of Education Secretaries (ten in ten years) makes cohesive, working relationships between politicians and civil servants within a large Department difficult. It has most likely undermined the Department's negotiations with the Treasury as it is difficult for ministers to master their briefs and make a good case for adequate funding (assuming, of course, as members of a cost-conscious government, they find sufficient motivation to make a case).
Of course, other large spending departments have also suffered over the same period. But, at the outset, driven by ambition, and a conviction that Labour must have got it wrong, Gove fundamentally reset the capital spending capacity of the Department. This downsizing was in the form of a relatively small centralised project management team.
Since then, no Education Secretary has shown sufficient nerve to step up, upgrade the DfE's project management infrastructure, and demand more cash. The present management arrangement was created a decade ago by those advocating fiscal conservatism. Today, our school building stock's deterioration has outpaced our project capacity.
In July, MabelPost 070723 suggested a separate National Social Infrastructure Authority (with regional offices) to manage schools and other local facilities. Another solution is to give local authorities power, responsibility and capital funds (although this may cause issues with Academy Trusts). Whatever is the answer to our problems, it's not the current arrangement. This is not to criticise the many good people who work for the Department, just the system under which they labour.
More funds are also required. The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) has chartered the historic decline in Capital Spending in schools over the last decade. A slight recovery is anticipated during 2023/24, with schools capital spending the most for five years. However, investment has fallen well short of the DfE's own assessment of the need.
The IFS notes that the Department for Education calculated that it needed about £5.3 billion per year from 2021 to 2025. £5.3 billion annually would allow DfE to maintain school buildings and mitigate the most serious risks. This assessment was based on a condition survey of all school buildings. However, DfE only requested about £4 billion per year based on the rate at which it thought it could increase spending (implying insufficient project management capacity). HM Treasury allocated about £3.1 billion per year. As a result, actual funding allocations from the government have been more than 40% below DfE's assessment of true need.
The NAO now estimates that 700,000 children are being taught in unsafe or ageing school buildings in England that need significant repairs.
Meanwhile, the RAAC crisis is ongoing; Keegan has reasonably decided that all 156 buildings where RAAC has been positively identified cannot be relied upon. But, according to the NAO's numbers, this still leaves over 400 buildings whose status is unclear. DfE officials were unable to clarify the position when they met MPs on 11 September. It's to be hoped that the DfE are getting on top of the situation, but this could still all end badly.
The premise of Labour's original programme was that we had until 2020 before the key elements of the original building stock would be beyond their natural design life. Right now, that feels about right. In the aforementioned NAO report, RAAC is only part of the problem; shabby, tired, cold, leaking, asbestos-ridden structures are still spread across England. Depressingly, right now, there is talk of diverting funds from previously identified projects to deal with RAAC structures (rather than providing additional funding). With regard to school buildings, Keegan will have done a f***ing outstanding job if she can:
fix RAAC without serious incident;
identify all future risks to life, limb and continual school provision;
develop plans to rebuild or renew all outdated schools by, say, 2030;
identify the management infrastructure needed to finish the job;
get hold of the cash.
Best of Luck, Gillian.