The metaphor offered by the RAAC (reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete scandal) is just too on the nose for any self-respecting commentator.

Schools literally crumbling as we head into the final academic year before an election? Get me another scriptwriter. But it’s all too real for the 150-plus headteachers who are having a nightmare return from the summer holidays.

It is still unclear how bad the immediate problem with crumbly concrete is, given that there are thousands of schools that haven’t been properly checked yet.

What is clear is that the government has known about the problem for years and has not moved with adequate pace to resolve the issue. It’s also clear that it’s only a foretaste of the wider problems that exist with the school estate.

A huge problem - and an expensive one

A report from the National Audit Office a few months ago noted that there were 24,000 school buildings - 38 per cent of the entire estate - being used beyond their initial design life.

Most of these will be safe, for now, but the longer they are left in place the more maintenance problems they’ll throw up and the more they’ll cost taxpayers.

The Department for Education (DfE) estimates that it needs more than £5 billion a year to manage the challenges - probably an underestimate - but has a budget of only £3 billion.

The situation will keep deteriorating until this is remedied. It is deeply annoying to see a refusal to maintain buildings trumpeted as the sensible, fiscally cautious approach when it is nothing more than a cheap accountancy trick.

This expensive failure is indicative of the general challenge facing secretary of state Gillian Keegan this year, and whoever replaces her after next year’s election: the costs of austerity are becoming unmanageable.

Schools overwhelmed by myriad challenges

We can all happily debate the merits of different types of curriculum and behaviour techniques, or whether GCSEs should be reformed, but these things are very much second-order issues right now.

It doesn’t matter which approach to pedagogy you want to take when teachers and leaders in many schools are furiously paddling just to keep their heads above water.

Last week the FT journalist Jennifer Williams published a widely acclaimed piece profiling Newman Roman Catholic College in Oldham and its headteacher, Glyn Potts.

The litany of challenges that Potts is facing: a hardship fund overwhelmed by rising poverty; a mental health crisis; high levels of persistent absenteeism; an inability to recruit teachers; support staff short on food because of the cost-of-living crisis - will be all too familiar to leaders across the country.

As Potts told Williams, schools “have become an emergency service”.

Without fixing these basics nothing else can work. Yet doing so is beyond the control of Keegan, or any secretary of state, both because they cost money and because many of the problems aren’t the responsibility of her department.

Deepening poverty is a deliberate design feature of the benefits system, with its caps, limits and sanctions.

Mental health is the responsibility of a health department struggling with record waiting lists. Even on those issues where the DfE could do something, either it doesn’t have the money, as with school buildings, or it is all out of ideas, as with teacher recruitment.

Honesty and integrity  

Any education secretary would struggle, but Keegan fails the one test that costs no money and doesn’t require any brilliant insights: honesty.

Her refusal to accept the extent of the difficulties that schools face - her Panglossian insistence that everything is fine, that schools have plenty of teachers and no financial troubles - is incredibly grating.

More and more school leaders are quitting - Potts admitted that he’d thought about doing so too - and the complete disconnect between our political leadership and reality isn’t helping to convince people to stay in the job.

Meanwhile, Labour is quite happy to talk about all these crises and (mostly fairly) blame the government for them, but it remains unclear what the party plans to do differently. Will it find the £2 billion a year extra for school buildings? Or extra money for pay to ease recruitment difficulties? Keir Starmer won’t even commit to ending the noxious “two child limit” on benefits, which would remove almost 300,000 children from poverty.

There are grand promises “to break the class ceiling” but no policies, yet, that come close to meeting that ambition. The challenge for both parties as we head towards the election is the same: are they going to accept that current spending plans are not viable?

Until they do we can’t begin to have a serious conversation about what it will take to get us out of this hole. 

Sam Freedman is a senior fellow at the Institute for Government and a former senior policy adviser at the Department for Education