Contractors have rejected deals to repair the nation’s most desperate school buildings because of inflation risks, a report has warned.
In a report published today (June 28), the National Audit Office (NAO) says a major government initiative to fix the blocks at 500 educational institutions in the most dire need has seriously failed.
As of March this year, only 24 contracts had been awarded through the School Reconstruction Programme, against a target of 83, according to the spending watchdog.
This comes as fears grow about the presence of autoclaved aerated concrete (RAAC) at risk of collapse in the public estate.
“The Department for Education (DfE) is behind its initial schedule in its program forecasts, largely due to builders not taking up contracts due to construction market volatility and risks inflationary,” says the NAO report.
Measures taken by the government to address the problem include changing its approach to project financing, the watchdog added.
The report reveals that 24 schools in England and Wales require immediate work due to the presence of controversial RAAC in their buildings.
The NAO said the DfE had already identified these urgent cases, with specialists only a third of the way through detailed assessments of 600 suspected presences of the controversial material in its heritage.
A further 41 schools have been identified as containing RAAC, although they were deemed to be of less concern, while thousands of schools have yet to complete their own investigations, meaning many more uses of the material could be discovered high risk
RAAC has been in the spotlight since the sudden collapse of a school roof in Kent in 2018. A Standing Committee on Structural Safety (SCOSS) report the following year warned that the material was inherently “much weaker” than traditional concrete and had a “lifetime” of about three decades.
Done without coarse aggregate, the RAAC fell out of favor in the 1980s and the Local Government Association (LGA) warned councils last year that it was now “life-expired and liable to collapse”.
Separately, the DfE has approved plans for invasive structural assessment of blocks built by the system at 200 sites where it is concerned about deterioration, but no specialists have yet been appointed to carry out the work.
In total, 700,000 pupils are learning at a school which has been highlighted as requiring “major rebuilding or reform”, the NAO said.
“There is a significant gap between the funding available and what the DfE assesses it needs to achieve its aim of school buildings being safe and in good condition,” the report states.
The watchdog urged ministers to establish a plan to deal with RAAC across the education sector and to consider reviewing school maintenance funding and needs assessment.
Public Accounts Committee chair Meg Hillier said it was “worrying” that the government “doesn’t know how many schools may be unsafe”.
He added: “After years of firefighting problems, parents need reassurance that the DfE knows where, when and how risks to their children will be tackled.”
A DfE spokesman said: “Nothing is more important than the safety of students and teachers, which is why we have been investing significantly in the transformation of schools across the country.
“We are investing in 500 projects for new and renovated school buildings through our School Reconstruction Program. In addition, we have allocated more than £15 billion since 2015 to keep schools safe and operational, including the £1.8 billion pledged for 2023/24.
“It is the responsibility of those who run our schools – academy trustees, local authorities and volunteer-led school bodies – who talk to their schools on a day-to-day basis, manage the maintenance of their schools and let us know if there are there is a problem. concern about a building. We will always provide support on a case-by-case basis if these responsible bodies alert us to a serious safety issue.”
Meanwhile, a separate NAO report found that the DfE “lacks a clear national picture of the sustainability position of the school estate or the risks that climate change poses to the sector”.
The department has focused funding on reducing security risks in buildings rather than making them more environmentally friendly and resilient, the watchdog added. He called for a decarbonisation plan to define progress towards net zero schools.
A DfE spokesman said: “The difficulty of decarbonising a large estate is not unique to the education sector and work of this scale takes time. We have already improved the specification of our buildings to better than national standards. All our new buildings are net zero in operation and designed for a temperature rise of 2oC and resistant to a temperature rise of 4oC.
“As part of our sustainability and climate change strategy, a first of its kind for an education system, we are assessing emissions and the risk posed to schools by climate change impacts such as flooding. This will allow us to set goals and act efficiently and with the least disruption.”
