āSafety isnāt expensive, its priceless" - Jerry Smith
For five years the government has known that school roofs constructed with lightweight concrete known as RAAC were liable to collapse without warning. In 2018 a school roof in Gravesend Kent caved in on a Saturday, soĀ luckily no one was injured.
This structural failure led to an enquiry by the Standing Committee on Structural Safety (Scoss). This committee reported in 2019 that a similar collapse had occurred in a retail unit using the same type of concrete planking used in the construction of many schools. As a result, says New Civil Engineer:
āAs the lifespan of the planks is estimated to be around 30 years, Scoss is now recommending that allĀ planks installed before 1980 are replaced.ā (14/05/19)
This clearly hasnāt happened. For reasons of cost, the safety of our children in schools built using RAAC has been deliberately ignored. It was estimated that a yearly fund of Ā£7billion was needed to replace these buildings but the Treasury only allocated Ā£3billion.
Money before lives is nothing new as far as Tory policy is concerned. But why the sudden change in heart? Why decide to close schools only a few days before the start of the new school year when the Tories have deliberately ignored the seriousness of the problem for years?
On the BBC Today programme this morning (01/09/230 , amid all the platitudes rolled out by the Schools Minister Nick Gibb, the true reason slipped out. During the summer break, in a school previously labelled as "safe" a roof beam collapsed.
In other words, even though for the past four years the government has known that roofs with RAAC were liable to collapse without warning it wasnāt until another school roof collapsed during this summer that they took the safety of childrenās lives seriously.
Those school rooms with roofs that are deemed āunsafe" will either be abandoned, the children being taught in temporary classrooms,Ā or haveĀ their roofs propped up in some way, making them little better than a building site.
Our children deserve so much better and the Secretary of State for Education, Gillian Keegan,Ā should resign immediately.
