Munira Wilson
Main Page: Munira Wilson (Liberal Democrat - Twickenham)Department Debates - View all Munira Wilson's debates with the Department for Education
School Building Closures
Munira Wilson Excerpts(1 year, 3 months ago)
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Gillian Keegan
I confirm that Haygrove School is not subject to RAAC. It is a Caledonian Modular build, and we are looking at the quality of a small number of those schools. We are working right now on what solutions we can put in place. There is another such school in the constituency of my right hon. Friend the Minister for Skills, Apprenticeships and Higher Education, and we are putting temporary school structures in place for those schools.
Munira Wilson (Twickenham) (LD)
The crumbling concrete crisis has been years in the making, exacerbated by the catastrophic failure of the Prime Minister, when he was Chancellor, to sign off on the school rebuilding programme that Department for Education officials requested. Yet the current Chancellor, as we have heard today, will not give the Department any new money to fix the roofs. So what does the Secretary of State say to the hundreds of schools currently managing asbestos, leaky roofs and cold classrooms, which will be put to the back of the queue for a rebuild yet again because the Treasury still does not understand the importance of investing in our children and education?
Gillian Keegan
As someone who has been the Secretary of State since October and has secured record funding for our schools—going up to £60 billion a year next year, which is higher than it has ever been by any measure hon. Members wish to use—I feel that the Chancellor and the Prime Minister very much invest in our schools.
There has been a lot of nonsense talked about Building Schools for the Future. Opposition Members consistently claim that that would have fixed the issue. I know they are not normally across the details, so I thought they might be interested in a few facts. Park View School in Tottenham, which was recently visited by the Leader of the Opposition, Hornsey School for Girls in Hornsey and Stepney All Saints School in Stepney Green were all refurbished or rebuilt under BSF, but all three are still suffering from RAAC. The Opposition do not even know how to solve the problem when it is right in front of their nose.