Schools minister makes important admission over concrete crisis
There was an important admission from long-serving schools minister Nick Gibb on Sky News – that the Treasury did prevent his department rebuilding more schools.
Unlike his boss Gillian Keegan, who has been in post as education secretary for just 10 months, Mr Gibb – who has served in a ministerial role at the department on and off since 2010 – did see the crumbling concrete crisis set in.
He conceded that in the 2021 spending round, the Department for Education “of course put in a bid for 200 schools to be rebuilt”.
How did they end up with 50 then, he was asked?
“The Treasury then has to compare that bid with all the other priorities right across Whitehall from the health service, from defence and so on”, he said.
This tallies with what Jonathan Slater, former top civil servant at the department, told BBC Radio 4 on Monday when he said the department believed 300 to 400 schools a year needed rebuilding.
He said funding was given for 100 – and officials had hoped to double it – but Rishi Sunak, as chancellor, took the decision to “halve the size of the programme” despite what the former mandarin called a “critical risk to life” after primary school roofs started to fail.
Mr Sunak angrily rejected the idea he had taken a red pen to the proposal, but Mr Gibb backed it up.
The prime minister said on Monday that the current School Rebuilding Programme, launched in 2020, would refurbish 500 schools over the decade – or 50 a year, which he claimed was in line with previous years.
The problem is many of these schools have been waiting a very long time.
A total of 1,105 applied for the first round of the Rebuilding Programme in February 2021, for 61 initial projects.
Some of these were first set for refurbishment back in 2010 under Labour’s Building Schools for the Future programme, which was later scrapped by Michael Gove.
Capital spending – including on schools – has been on a steep decline since, from £9.8bn in 2009-10 to £4.9bn in 2021-22.
This is despite a report into school buildings by the National Audit Office this year highlighting “years of underinvestment”, which had left 700,000 pupils learning in a school that the responsible body or education department believes is inadequate.