School staff union leaders have written a joint letter to the education secretary with urgent questions about RAAC (reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete) as they warned that “hundreds more schools” could be affected.
Leaders from the NEU teaching union, the NAHT school leaders union, NASUWT, Unison, GMB and Unite have called for Gillian Keegan to update figures on how many schools could be at risk of RAAC.
The letter asked how many schools suspect they have RAAC but haven’t been surveyed.
Leaders also asked how long the government expects it to take to investigate all schools at risk or with suspected RAAC, and whether a deadline has been set for getting rid of RAAC in every school.
The Department for Education (DfE) released details of the 147 schools with confirmed RAAC on Wednesday. It had previously said there were 156 schools confirmed to have the concrete and that 52 already had mitigations in place.
Ms Keegan said earlier this week that 95 per cent of responsible bodies had returned surveys reporting whether or not they had suspected RAAC. Baroness Barran wrote to those identified as not having responded giving them a deadline of 8 September to return the questionnaires.
But yesterday, multi-academy trust leaders and the Association of School and College Leaders reported that several responsible bodies claimed they had received the letter from Baroness Barran in error.
In their letter to the education secretary, published today, union leaders cited a report from the National Audit Office (NAO), which used DfE figures from May 2023, saying that 14,900 schools were at risk of RAAC. Of those, 6,300 had walked around and tried to identify possible RAAC, and 572 of those suspected they had it.
Of those, 196 had then been surveyed to determine whether they had RAAC, with 65 confirming it was present. Union leaders are demanding that those figures are updated “in order to eliminate misunderstanding of the scale of the problem”.
The letter said: “Using the data the DfE provided to the NAO, we estimate that hundreds more schools could have RAAC and we presume this is why you told the Today programme there could be ‘hundreds’ more schools with RAAC.
“If the government does not increase funding for the school rebuilding programme, which is currently refurbishing 50 schools a year, then the RAAC problem will not be resolved until the 2030s.”
The DfE has been approached for a comment.
School closes over suspected RAAC
The union leaders’ letter was sent as a primary school announced that it would be the latest to close its building and move to remote learning because of concerns about suspected RAAC.
In a letter to parents and carers announcing its “emergency” closure, Woodhouse Primary Academy in Quinton, Birmingham, said it had taken the decision to switch to online learning for pupils as it could not completely ensure their safety.
The letter, issued on Wednesday evening, said: “Following the letter that you received yesterday, which explained that there was a possibility that there may be RAAC (reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete) present in our school, we have been unable to establish the necessary reassurances that there is no RAAC present.
“Therefore, we cannot completely ensure the safety of everyone within the school building at this time.”
The school said that when it received the latest updates from the DfE around RAAC on 31 August 2023, “we acted without delay to arrange surveys to provide us with definitive evidence that there was no RAAC present”.
These were in addition to its own condition survey that had already been completed in the summer term, the letter said, adding: “Our survey identified that there may be some risk and we then commissioned the DfE survey. We are still awaiting a survey.”
