Safety of School Buildings

Layla Moran Excerpts

Tuesday 23rd May 2023 Commons Chamber

[David Johnston (Wantage) (Con)]

The condition of school buildings is important. It affects learning and it is very much why the Government are funding more than 1,000 school improvement programmes through a £1.8 billion investment. That is part of a much wider amount of money being put into schools, with £58.8 billion to come in 2024-25. That will be the largest amount going into schools that there has ever been. My constituency, which runs from Wallingford to Shrivenham, has benefited from that. Schools from Wallingford to Shrivenham have benefited in particular from the condition improvement fund. Nine schools have benefited so far, including Wallingford School and St John’s Primary School yesterday.

While the condition of the building is important, what goes on inside the building is also important. I will never tire of reminding Opposition Members that in 2019 they stood on a manifesto to abolish SATs, Ofsted and academy schools. I would very much like to hear what they think about the fact that we came fourth in the global rankings for reading last week. I would like to hear what they think about their friends at the National Education Union who keep calling strikes in the run-up to exams for children who missed so much school time during covid. What would their approach be to these unions were they in government? Would it be beer and sandwiches? The NEU runs statements every day welcoming whatever Labour says. It runs paid-for social media ads against Conservative colleagues. The NEU clearly thinks it will get a better deal from the Labour party, so what will it be?

I like counting things, and Members will know that the last time we had an education debate, I counted how many times the Leader of the Opposition talked about education in his speech setting out his vision for the country. It was zero. I counted how many policies the Labour party has on education, and there are two. The first is breakfast clubs, a policy Labour likes so much that it has announced it twice, in March 2021 and then again 18 months later. I am afraid that does not count as an additional policy; it is just the same policy being repeated. The other is VAT on private schools, which few people believe would raise any money. It is small fry for the whole of the education system.

What we find over and over again is this sort of student union vibe of bringing motions on education. We have had eight Opposition day motions on education from the Labour party since the general election. The Leader of the Opposition has mentioned it zero times, Labour has two policies on it, but we have had eight debates. Today’s motion is a classic example of that, because there is no policy in it. It does not say whether we are spending too much or too little. It does not say what Labour would do or how it would pay for it. It is just another attempt, as the Chair of the Select Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for Worcester (Mr Walker) said, to try to strike fear into people about what is going on in our schools.

[Layla Moran (Oxford West and Abingdon) (LD)]

I am extremely grateful to my Oxfordshire colleague for giving way, and I too have some of our county’s secondary schools. I am curious about whether he has had the same representations as I have had from heads in Oxfordshire, who are desperate for their buildings to be improved. I have one school where the toilets have become such no-go areas that a child said they no longer drink when they are at school because they are scared to go into them. This is a great school—it is outstanding—and what goes on in it is fantastic, but surely he would agree that improvement can be made to school buildings and that the Government need to help.

[David Johnston]

I said at the start that the condition of school buildings is very important, and as my right hon. Friend the Minister set out, lots of these schools are being rebuilt as part of this. As I said, I have nine that are being rebuilt. To go back to the Labour party, as it is Labour’s motion, if we look at what has happened in Wales, where it is in charge, there has been no audit of schools’ conditions since 2017. Again, it is a case of “Do as we say, not do as we do”.

The Labour party is currently into setting missions. We do not have a lot of policy, but we are told that the shadow Chancellor is stopping a lot of policy because she does not want to make unfunded spending commitments. I do not think it can be that, because we are already up to £90 billion of unfunded spending commitments. It is just that we do not seem to have many in education. However, Labour is into setting missions, which seem to be big statements with no detail about how it will achieve them. Surprise, surprise, but we have not yet had one for education, so I have a suggestion. Let us have a mission for this area, and let us have the Labour party have a big five-year mission to find some education policy.

--- Later in debate ---

[Munira Wilson (Twickenham) (LD)]

So far, we have heard a lot about what we do not know, but I want to remind the House about what we do know about the results of the last condition data collection survey, completed in 2019. Over 7,000 schools contained a building component deemed to be life-expired or at serious risk of imminent failure. Almost nine in 10 schools in England had at least one component with “major defects” or “not operating as intended”. Overall, more than 240,000 items across the school estate—from doors to electrics to light fittings—were defective.

We know this not because the Department published the information itself but because of a series of written questions that I tabled last year. I am grateful to those on the Labour Front Bench for drawing attention to them. However, one fact that the Government did publish is that under the Conservatives the overall condition of the school estate has tanked. In 2014, the cost of the total maintenance backlog stood at £6.7 billion. It now stands at a whopping £11.4 billion. I have heard of “a stitch in time saves nine”, but the Conservatives have lost the repair kit and cost the taxpayer billions of pounds.

There is still much about the survey that we do not know. We do not know which schools received what grading for each of their components, and we do not know how much the total repair bill is in each council area or constituency. We have been told by the Minister that the data is forthcoming and that he needs more time to process it, but this survey is now four years old. How much longer must parents wait to see if their child’s school is safe and fit for purpose?

[Layla Moran]

My hon. Friend is making a powerful speech. A headteacher I spoke to this week said that he spends his whole time just keeping his students safe, warm and dry, when what he wants to do is create an inspirational space in which they can learn. Does my hon. Friend agree that this Government seem to want us to be grateful for the very lowest levels, when instead we should be focused on having a great school for every child in this country?

[Munira Wilson]

I could not agree with my hon. Friend more. I regularly hear from teachers that they are doing so much outside their core remit of teaching in order to support our students, and buildings are another example. A teacher from St Mary’s and St Peter’s School in Teddington came to visit me recently. She told me that she had had a bucket in her classroom for two years because the school could not afford the maintenance to fix it. Not repairing those sorts of things now will cost a hell of a lot more further down the line.

We know that some of the stats I have just quoted represent the tip of the iceberg, because the condition data collection survey is based purely on a visual inspection of school sites, meaning that latent problems in the school estate are going undetected. Thanks to an investigation by “ITV News”, we know that 68 schools contain reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete, a building material likened to an Aero chocolate bar, which even the Office of Government Property has described as

“life-expired and liable to collapse”.

Yet thousands more schools do not know whether their site contains RAAC, because it cannot be identified on a visual inspection.

Every shut classroom, leaky roof and cold sports hall stands as a concrete sign of the Government’s neglect in investing in our schools and colleges. Parents, carers and communities are fed up of being let down and taken for granted, and there are few more concrete signs of a community being neglected than a crumbling school or hospital building. The Conservatives are learning the hard way, as the amazing by-election victory of my hon. Friend the Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Richard Foord) shows. He ran a fantastic campaign on rebuilding Tiverton High School, and it took that by-election win and a question to the Prime Minister in the leadership hustings finally to get a promise of money for the school, yet we still have no start date for shovels in the ground.

Communities across this country are feeling let down. In my borough, two schools that applied to the school rebuilding programme last year had their application rejected. Twenty-three of 25 schools in Surrey met the same fate, as did six of seven schools in East Sussex. People are fed up and angry, and they want to make their voice heard. The Liberal Democrats believe that education is an investment in our children’s future. Spending on human capital generates returns for generations to come. It is absurd that the Treasury will predict that a new rail line will generate returns worth multiple times its initial cost while predicting that capital investment in schools returns just a fraction of the amount. How can that make sense?

The Government must invest to clear the backlog of repairs to school and college buildings. Parents deserve to know their children are being sent to schools that are safe and fit for purpose. They expect their Government to be transparent and they expect their community not to be taken for granted, yet the state of their local school often suggests otherwise. Neglecting school and college buildings endangers our children and may well contribute to this Government’s downfall.