Schools face wait for mobile classrooms as ground ‘too soft’, minister admits

Eight mobile classrooms that were supposed to house primary school pupils disrupted by the unsafe concrete crisis this week will now not be available until November because the ground is too soft, it has emerged.

Conservative MP Mark Francois said there were a “number of differences” between what the Department for Education (DfE) had told him about affected schools in his Rayleigh and Wickford constituency in Essex and the “ground truth” experienced by schools and teachers.

The revelation casts doubt on whether the full list of schools affected by the scandal, which Education Secretary Gillian Keegan has pledged will be published later this week, will have the most up-to-date information for parents and teachers.

The minister admitted to MPs that the list, which consists of 156 schools affected but could reach several hundred, was a “moving feast”.

Hockley Primary School in Essex was closed in June after unstable reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete (RAAC) was discovered in one of the buildings.

Mr Francois told the Commons that the DfE had promised eight temporary classrooms ready for use by the school in time for the start of the new term this week, but “they now won’t be available until mid-November”.

He told Ms Keegan: “When this list is published later this week, can the Secretary of State please ensure that the information in it is absolutely accurate, absolutely up to date, because that is the best way to reassure parents, staff and pupils, not least those parents who will be very upset if they hear with virtually no notice they have to take weeks off work because their children cannot go to school.”

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The minister replied: “In the case of Hockley, soft ground has meant that we have had to put footings in place before we can put the temporary accommodation and each site is different to some degree. This is one of the reasons we were trying to get those mitigations in place.

“I’m afraid the list and the information will evolve over time as we get more and more details and the caseworkers will keep us up to date with that.”

Ms Keegan later admitted that it was “difficult to ensure 100 per cent accuracy on a moving feast”.

Local authorities and academy trusts have been warned they have until the end of this week to return questionnaires, first sent out in March 2022, to the DfE on details of assessments they have made on whether RAAC is suspected in their schools.

Ms Keegan has extended the number of surveying companies enlisted by the DfE to carry out work from three to eight, and surveyors are expected to be dispatched to hundreds of schools in the next two weeks in an acceleration of the DfE’s work to tackle the issue, i has been told.

More than £2.6m has already been spent on surveying firms by the DfE to investigate RAAC in schools, according to the government’s procurement database, but the department has said it plans to spend £6m in total on surveying, suggesting they are less than halfway through the work to assess the scale of the problem.