The response to the crumbling concrete crisis has been “world leading”, the schools minister has said, despite ordering the full or partial closure of more than 100 schools in England just before the start of term.
Nick Gibb’s comments came after his boss, education secretary Gillian Keegan, said she was frustrated that no one was acknowledging what a “fucking good job” she was doing.
Mr Gibb said the Department for Education was acting to keep children safe from the risk posed by collapse-prone reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete (RAAC).
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Asked about the education secretary’s sweary outburst, Mr Gibb told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme this morning: “What she was trying to get across is the huge amount of work that the DfE has done.
“We are world leading in terms of identifying where RAAC is in our school estate.
‘We know where RAAC is’ in schools
“We’re talking about a small number of schools out of 22,500 schools, but we have conducted surveys since March last year, so we know where RAAC is, and we’re sending in surveyors to identify RAAC.
“And then an important decision was taken last Thursday to keep children safe with new evidence that emerged about non-critical RAAC that we now believe is unsafe, and we took the difficult decision [to order schools to close] because we want to keep children safe.”
Mr Gibb was challenged on a claim made by a former DfE permanent secretary that Rishi Sunak, as chancellor, responded to warnings about the state of school buildings by halving the number of schools to be rebuilt.
Mr Gibb confirmed that his department had bid for 200 new school buildings a year because “that’s what we do in spending departments”.
But he denied the current prime minister had “got it wrong”, saying: “No, I don’t think he did because it’s consistent...one of the first things he did as chancellor was announce the 500 schools rebuilding programme between 2020 and 2030.”
In criticism caught on camera after an interview on Monday, a frustrated Ms Keegan hit out at those who she argued had “sat on their arse and done nothing”.
She also questioned why no one was saying “you’ve done a fucking good job”, before being forced to go before broadcasters to apologise for the language she used.
Ms Keegan went on to admit to being on holiday in Spain in the run-up to ordering more than 100 schools and colleges in England to make complete or partial closures.
She was facing her Cabinet colleagues on Tuesday morning as the prime minister assembled his top team for their first meeting since returning from the Commons’ summer break.
Ministers have been accused of taking a “sticking plaster approach” to essential buildings maintenance by the head of the Whitehall spending watchdog.
Writing in the Times, National Audit Office chief Gareth Davies suggested that there had not been sufficient focus on “unflashy but essential tasks” such as maintaining public buildings that have faced “underinvestment”.
On Monday, the prime minister admitted that hundreds more schools could have been built with problematic RAAC.
He insisted that 95 per cent of England’s schools were unaffected, leaving open the possibility that more than 1,000 could still be affected by the collapse-risk material.
Downing Street said the total number was expected to be in the hundreds rather than the thousands.
Mr Sunak was also accused by a former top official at the DfE of having declined a request for funding to rebuild more schools while he was chancellor.
