How is the RAAC crisis being managed — is it a ‘f****** good job’ at all?

Niladri Singh

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In the early weeks of September before the start of the new school year, the UK government announced that school buildings containing RAAC would need to close or delay opening owing to a risk of collapse.

Now 100s of schools in England have been shut or partially closed because of the risks associated with RAAC, and could potentially be one of the biggest public safety scandals in the last few decades.

But did the Prime Minister address this at the Conservatives conference in Manchester on 4th October? No.

Hot Mic: Gillian Keegan responds to the RAAC crisis

As the Department of Education faced this fast-approaching storm, Education Minister Gillian Keegan found herself in the midst of further scrutiny when her “off-the-cut remark” about the RAAC crisis was mistakenly heard out loud on record. 

Still wearing her microphone after the end of her ITV interview, she asked the people in the room:

“Does anyone ever say, ‘You know what, you’ve done a f****** good job;’ because everyone else has sat on their a*** and done nothing?”

But is it even a job well done when school buildings are being shut down, right before the new school year?

The scandal hit the headlines after an East London secondary school had to close because of RAAC concerns, sending 1,800 students home with minimal warning. The classes and lessons for closed schools will now have to mirror online forms of learning — the memory of which is still fresh after the 2020 Covid pandemic.

Having lived through the pandemic, we know for certain that there is absolutely nothing that can equate or beat face-to-face learning. The fact that students, young children and parents have to re-live, even if only a very small, part of our 2020 lives is not only a failure of the materials the buildings are made of, but also of the systems that help make these buildings.

What is RAAC?

Reinforced Autoclaved Aerated Concrete (RAAC) was invented in Sweden in the 1930s. It is a lightweight form of precast concrete, cheap and frequently used in public sector buildings in the UK from the mid-1960s to the 1990s.

It looks exactly like pre-cast concrete and is found mainly in roofs and occasionally in floors and walls. Water, from leaks, for instance, can compromise the reinforcement steel bars contained within RAAC planks deteriorating its condition. Over time when the reinforcement erodes, the concrete can “fail catastrophically and suddenly” — and catastrophically it failed indeed.

“The problem had been flagged, yet ceilings are still crumbling.”

Questions were first raised in 2018 when a primary school in Kent suffered a collapsed ceiling because of an RAAC failure. Nobody was hurt, but it didn’t exactly leave parents and teachers with a peaceful disposition. Former permanent secretary of the DfE Jonathan Slater made officials aware of the need to rebuild 300-400 schools a year, but the Treasury would only provide capital for 100 a year. In 2021, when Mr Sunak was Chancellor it was further cut to 50.

In mid-August 2023, the Health and Safety Executive announced that RAAC is “now life-expired” and “liable to collapse with little or no notice,” leading to the immediate closure of buildings and dozens of schools.

But how much more noticeable does a crumbling institution need to be? Surveys had been carried out a decade ago: the problem had been flagged, yet ceilings are still crumbling.

So how is this RAAC crisis handling really a ‘f****** good job?’

“…to put [schools] through this is an enormous dent on the credibility of the institutions that build the UK.”

Even if the affected numbers of schools and buildings do not continue to rise, the solutions to the RAAC crisis will be temporary and short-lived. With 147 schools (plus 27 in an updated list, and 23 NHS buildings) identified as having RAAC, this looks like the very tip of the iceberg. 

Gillian Keegan says the portacabins provided to schools with RAAC concrete are "very, very high quality" and the children actually prefer them to their normal classrooms.

Not sure what this says about the .. actual classrooms?

— Ava-Santina (@AvaSantina) September 19, 2023

An article published on DFE’s website details the support being provided, with each case being managed by one of the 80 caseworkers, alongside 10 regional directors and their teams who know local communities best. But some schools say they have been told they will have to fund their own emergency accommodation if buildings are closed. 

While schools and local bodies seem to stand strong in the face of such adversity, to put them through this is not only unfair, but also an enormous dent on the credibility of  the institutions that build the UK. If the government is to provide a safe, fun and non-threatening learning space for generations of students in the UK, the RAAC crisis must be dealt with as a top priority. Young lives are at stake.

READ NEXT:

• EMPOWORD EXPLAINS: THE UK SCHOOL CONCRETE CRISIS

• ARE SCHOOLS DOING ENOUGH TO PREPARE YOUNG PEOPLE FOR LIFE EVENTS?

• ONE IN EIGHT CONSTRUCTION FIRMS ON THE BRINK OF COLLAPSE

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Featured image courtesy of UK Government via Flickr. No changes were made to this image. Image license found here.