Shameful school safety scandal has been years in the making: Andrew Vine

And how is it possible that nothing was done about it until a few days before the start of the autumn term?

Plunging schools into a crisis over how to accommodate pupils away from potentially unsafe classrooms and leaving parents uncertain if their children will once again have to be taught remotely as during the pandemic leaves the Government looking panicked and incompetent.

Although ministers have taken the only responsible course in ordering the closure of some school buildings because of the risk of the concrete they are built from collapsing, the questions they face over their lack of action until now intensify with every passing day.

It is not the Government’s fault that schools built decades ago used materials that over time have worn out to the point of becoming dangerous.

But it is the Government’s fault that nothing appears to have been done about it despite repeated warnings going back more than 20 years.

This is the real scandal behind the turmoil engulfing more than 150 schools – that ministers acted only in response to urgent concerns over safety rather than ensuring that buildings were fit for children and staff.

And yesterday, the most awkward of questions about how this has happened was aimed at the Prime Minister, when it was claimed he slashed school maintenance budgets two years ago while Chancellor.

Instead of our children attending schools that are safe and suitable for modern learning, some at least are being taught in clapped-out buildings and there seems to have been a shameful degree of governmental complacency about it.

Parents who this week are likely to be faced with childcare difficulties, as well as worry about their sons’ and daughters’ safety, have every right to be furious about this.

Many children’s education has already been grievously disrupted by the Covid restrictions, possibly compromising their future success, and more upheaval as a result of having to stay at home as schools scramble to install portable buildings can only make matters worse.

Even the Government’s handling of providing temporary accommodation has been botched. Until a hasty U-turn on Friday, schools were going to have to find money for portable buildings out of their own already stretched budgets.

This has been a crisis a long time in the making, and the more information that emerges, the clearer it becomes that ministers’ failure to act verges on the irresponsible.

Warnings from structural engineers about the type of concrete at risk of collapse go back to the 1990s, but they have become increasingly urgent over the past five years, since the partial collapse of a roof at a Kent school in 2018.

Thankfully, it happened at a weekend. That same year, the Local Government Association started raising concerns, and then last year the Office of Government Property warned the concrete was liable to collapse.

Then in June this year, the National Audit Office voiced concerns as part of a report that found 700,000 pupils attended schools in need of major rebuilding or refurbishment.

Why were these warnings not heeded and acted upon?

In particular when the NAO reported in June, it would have given the Government the opportunity to introduce a programme of building closures on precautionary grounds and use the six weeks of the summer holidays to get temporary accommodation in place ready for this week’s reopening.

It took the collapse of a roof beam over the summer – again, thankfully, when classrooms were empty – to shake the Government out of its complacency.

Schools have been starved of investment for at least a decade since David Cameron as Prime Minister presided over a programme of austerity. Two years ago, the Government’s own figures showed that there was a school maintenance backlog of more than £11bn.

Meanwhile, even as parents worry if their children’s schools are safe because there isn’t the money to maintain them properly, billions are being wasted on a high speed rail line from London to Birmingham which even the Government’s own assessment says will never deliver on its original aims.

What a lunatic state of affairs, and what an indictment of how political expediency can make those who run our country lose sight of fundamental truths.

A school ought to be the safest place any child knows after their own home.

Ensuring that is the case costs money, and it should concentrate ministers’ minds on finding it that we have only luck to thank that this new school year is beginning with inconvenience and not tragedy.