Counting the costs of RAAC in schools

Days before the previous academic year started in September last year, many schools had to shut buildings because reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete "Raac", a dangerous type of concrete prone to collapse had been used in their construction. Experts advised that Raac has an estimate lifespan of around 30 years which meant that many of the buildings were at sudden risk of collapse. RAAC was predominantly used in public sector buildings constructed between the 1950s and 1990s, including schools, hospitals, police stations and social housing, and concerns about the safety of RAAC began to emerge in the 1980s when buildings constructed in the 50s started to show signs of failure due to the material’s estimated lifespan.

In 2018, the ceiling of a primary school in Gravesend, Kent that was built using RAAC collapsed. RAAC concerns re-emerged in September last year, when it was identified in hundreds of schools and at NHS hospital sites, leading to these buildings being closed. Figures from the Department for Education state in total 234 educational buildings in England were found to contain the risky concrete, including 94 secondary schools and 11 post-16 colleges. In the first term of the last academic year, students from affected schools had to take turns coming into makeshift classrooms, sometimes learning without desks in groups of more than 200 in a sports hall others were learning from home. Others were catching buses into school, only to be taken to alternative sites, eating into the school day. As a result of all this disruption many parents who were at the time deciding where they wanted their 10-year-olds to go to secondary school made the decision to go with non-affected schools wreaking havoc on the finances of affected schools.

St Leonard's Catholic School in Durham, a Raac affected school, was usually oversubscribed for its 230-odd places, but this academic year they only had around 180 new Year 7s. Due to the funding model for schools, the drop in numbers means that, because of a lag in funding, the school will receive £300,000 less than usual in 2025/26.  As the new Year 7s make their way through secondary school, the school fears it could mean that it is £2m short. It wants the government to guarantee its income based on the number of pupils in previous year groups. "We've staffed the school on 230 pupils in each year group and then all of a sudden, 50 students are not coming, quite understandably, because of the extreme situation," the headteacher advised "It's really disappointing because we've been hugely disadvantaged in the year that we've had, and then it feels like we're going to be further disadvantaged for a number of years."

There are usually waiting lists for Myton School in Warwick, says head teacher Andy Perry, but this year there will be nine new form groups instead of 10. Mr Perry says Raac will have had an impact, especially as another secondary school recently opened nearby, giving parents more choice when they were making their decisions last autumn. "Whilst the school's in a good place now, in the autumn term there was a huge amount of uncertainty over what Myton would look like, what the buildings would look like, how we would be able to educate the children," he says. "We will have a significant hit to our finances, which means we'll have to draw our belt in and have fewer staff."

Kim Earle, head teacher at Altrincham College, was no stranger to Raac when the guidance changed last August. The concrete was first discovered just before Christmas 2019 and large parts of the school ended up needing to close, including about 10 classrooms, a special educational needs facility and the school's drama studio. The school is now Raac-free and hasn't seen a drop in pupil numbers this year - although fewer students have chosen drama GCSE - but Ms Earle says she had to wait a year to be reimbursed £217,000 from the Department for Education (DfE) for the removal. "We have had to tighten our belts," she says, including hiring less experienced staff and cutting back on subject-specific spending, like PE equipment. "We had to introduce a sort of bidding system for staff... if they felt there was something they really needed."

Pepe Di’Iasio, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, is calling on the government to offer "financial protection" to schools in this situation, as well as funding to help pupils catch up on "lost learning". "Even small changes in pupil numbers can have significant implications for school budgets," he says. "This is a problem decades in the making and something that will be to the financial detriment of the schools affected for years to come."

There were concerns from many in the education sector such as the headteachers’ union the Association of School & College Leaders (ASCL) who advised the disruption could have affected students’ exam performances, pupils whose education was disrupted by the concrete crisis which closed hundreds of school buildings were refused consideration for any effects it may have had on their A-level exams despite comments from Pepe Di’Iasio “Schools and colleges affected by Raac have worked extremely hard to support students whose studies have been disrupted by this issue and they deserve an enormous amount of credit for all they have done. We don’t feel that they were adequately supported by the previous government in this task and we are concerned about the potential impact on exam performance.”

But Sir Ian Bauckham, head of England’s exams regulator Ofqal, said it would be difficult to allow a special uplift to pupils’ results in schools affected by the concrete and not make adjustments for other factors such as teacher shortages and inadequate facilities. “It’s very difficult to know how you would draw a line and maintain fairness if you were going to say that it would be right, for example, to give a 10 per cent uplift to one set of circumstances but not to a range of other circumstances that other people might argue have impacted the quality of education in the schools that they’re running, or they’re working in, or attending. There are lots of unfortunately difficult problems that affect school, I’ve dealt with many of these myself over the years and inadequate facilities, teacher shortages and so on are among the problems that schools face.”

Of the 234 schools and colleges in England identified to have been built with Raac. It placed around half of them on the School Rebuilding Programme, filling the final spots and dashing the hopes of other old schools without Raac which had applied for rebuilds. The rest were told they would receive grant funding to remove the Raac, bar a handful that had alternative plans already and of the 110 schools set to receive grants, 20 responded to emails sent by the BBC of which six said all Raac had been removed, one said some Raac had been removed and 13 said no Raac had been removed.

Now, as schools prepare for another year affected by Raac, a head teachers' union is warning that many will feel the financial impact for "years to come". Every school with Raac has had a different experience, depending on the extent of the Raac, its location within the school, and the location of the school within the country. In February, Bridget Phillipson, then Labour's shadow education secretary, asked the DfE to publish a planned timetable, external for the removal of Raac from the school estate, the following month, she said the government also needed to provide timelines to all schools in need of rebuilding work, regardless of whether or not they had Raac. The new government has said it was working closely with schools and colleges with Raac. "We remain fully focused on work to resolve this problem as quickly as possible, permanently removing Raac either through grant funding or the school rebuilding programme," it said.