These surveys were completed months ago. So why on earth wasn't action for the affected schools taken through the 6 week summer holidays to ensure that remedial action and/or temporary accommodation was in place for the new school term. Giving schools just 4 days to sort this out beggars belief.
Nick Gibbs, the schools minister, was completely evasive about when the 'new' information he claimed had come to light. He kept being pushed but just said it came to light in the summer.
I work in management of schools, so some insight here.
We were all, well over two years ago, sent notification that some projects had been suffering premature deterioration of RAAC i structures, and to conduct inspections and surveys to find out who had it, and where it was found to see what condition it was in. This was repeated a few times, and got serious around Christmas of last year when there were two formal reporting deadlines sent out: 1 (around February, if i recall) to confirm where RAAC was present, and then a later one for the end of Summer to confirm that condition surveys of the RAAC found had been completed. (I get a little vague here, as none of our schools have any so I wasn't paying as much attention after that first reporting deadline).
What appears to have happened is that the government has suddenly implemented requirements late in the day on schools where it's present. In principle, of course, schools with RAAC and surveys showing problems should have remedied them over the summer, but the combination of public sector procurement rules (which MASSIVELY delays the implementation of even moderately sized projects) and the lack of any funding provision meant that with those deadlines schools were never going to have fixed this.
My guess is that the schools which have been pinged are the ones where their proposed mitigation measures weren't deemed adequate - we've not been involved in that end of things because, as I say, we're not directly affected.
O.
