Around 700,000 children in England are studying in schools requiring major rebuilding or refurbishment, a new National Audit Office report on the condition of school buildings says.
The UK's public spending watchdog found that more than a third – 24,000 – of English school buildings are past their estimated initial design life. They may not all be at risk of collapse but are generally more expensive to maintain and costlier to run.
As many as 572 schools, however, are reckoned to have been built with reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete (RAAC) planks and may now be at risk of collapse. Last year the DfE warned that the risk of schools collapsing had increased from ‘likely’ to ‘very likely’ as more structural faults were being found. DfE has been considering the potential risk posed by RAAC since late 2018, following a school roof collapse.
In its report, Condition of school buildings, the NAO says that there is shortfall in funding being made available by the Treasury to the DfE for making school buildings safe. DfE has reported £7bn a year as the best practice level of capital funding to maintain, repair and rebuild the school estate. In 2020, it recommended funding of £5.3bn a year to maintain schools and mitigate the most serious risks of building failure after expanding its school rebuilding programme. It has actually been getting an average of £3.1bn a year for building works since 2016.
But even this money is not translating into improvements as quickly as planned. Between 2016 and 2022, DfE spent an average £2.3bn a year.
The plan is to re-build 500 schools over a 10-year programme. As at March 2023, DfE had awarded 24 construction contracts, compared with its forecast of 83, with one project completed compared with its forecast of four, the NAO found.
In addition, DfE forecasts that it will complete fewer projects in the current financial year than initially planned.
Reasons for this slower than planned progress include construction companies deciding not to take up contracts for fear of being stung by inflation and losing money on the jobs.
DfE continues to build its understanding of where RAAC is used, including by collating questionnaire responses from schools, but does not currently have the information required to fully manage potential risks, the report says. At May 2023, 6,300 (42%) of the schools on which DfE has chosen to focus had completed work to establish if it was present. At that point, through questionnaire responses and wider work, DfE identified RAAC may be present in 572 schools. DfE has allocated £6m for specialists to investigate 600 schools potentially affected by RAAC. By May 2023, 196 investigations had been conducted, with RAAC confirmed in 65 schools. In May 2023, DfE announced that, where RAAC is present in schools, it would provide funding to ensure that it does not pose an immediate risk.
More positively, the report found that DfE had collected better evidence on the condition of the whole estate. This included identifying 13,800 system-built blocks – almost all containing asbestos. However, of these around 3,600 may be more susceptible to deterioration. In September 2022, DfE approved plans for a structural assessment of 200 system-built blocks to help better understand the risks but none have been conducted yet.
National Audit Office head Gareth Davies said: "At present, 700,000 pupils are learning in schools requiring major rebuilding or refurbishment. DfE has, since 2021, assessed the risk of school building failure or collapse as critical and very likely, but it has not been able to reduce this risk. More widely, it has an ambitious strategy for decarbonising the education estate but no plan for how it will achieve this or how much it is likely to cost.
"DfE is gathering some of the data it needs to effectively target its resources. It must now use this to improve its understanding of where schools are most at risk so it can balance addressing the most urgent risks while investing enough in maintenance, reducing carbon emissions, and climate change adaptation measures to achieve its objectives and secure longer-term value for money."
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