The Tories’ dreadful handling of the school concrete crisis

Pupils are due to head back to school over the coming days, but now it seems that some of them might not. Yesterday, the government told schools to prepare evacuation plans for buildings made with RAAC concrete. This morning, schools were instructed to close these buildings altogether. This has caused immense disruption to at least 156 schools who now have to arrange alternative provision a mere couple of days, or in some cases, hours, before their students were due to crowd their corridors. To add insult to injury, schools will have to pay for these new measures themselves, and some parents have already been warned that disruption may last until 2025.

The government may protest that this is a proactive and precautionary measure, but really this is a cautionary tale of what happens when you continuously kick the can down the road. Concerns about the durability of RAAC were first flagged by an engineer in 1995; then a report in 2007 also noted that RAAC could structurally degrade.