Hundreds of crumbling schools to be renovated but critics say it won’t make up for ‘years of underfunding’
Some 239 schools and sixth form colleges have received funding to replace crumbling facilities, but critics say the cost will be enormous and classrooms are in a bad state due to “years of underfunding”.
The schools and colleges named are in addition to 161 previously given the go-ahead by the Department for Education (DfE).
It means 400 out of a possible 500 projects have now been selected for overhauls, through the department’s school rebuilding programme.
The DfE said last year that the most acute need is in the East and West Midlands, and that an estimated £11.4bn is needed to bring the school buildings up to scratch.
This is a marked jump from the £6.7bn in backlog maintenance for schools estimated by the National Audit Office in 2017. While not directly comparable figures, it is clear the funding gap is growing.
Schools make up more than half of government buildings in terms of area, yet they only receive around 15% of annual running costs.
In fact, of all government departments, schools receive the least money for building upkeep per square metre of floor area.
The education secretary has said more funding will be announced soon for the latest 239 schools to be approved for the programme.
Speaking to Sky News, Gillian Keegan said there is “always a value-for-money question” and “you’ve got to make sure what you’re doing makes sense and does deliver value to students”.
Steven Marsland, headmaster at Russell Scott Primary in Manchester, said he has had “sleepless nights” worrying about children’s safety at his school.
He said he is delighted to have his school chosen for renovation but added: “It won’t make up for the last eight years.”
Mr Marsland said the school had been flooded by raw sewage on several occasions after it rose up through the drains and classroom ceilings have been crumbling because of a botched rebuild.
He said: “You just worry all the time.
“You’ve got all these children who depend on you and one wrong call and they would pay the consequences.”
An image taken of a school by Sky News
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Other teachers described mouldy classrooms, faulty electrics and leaking roofs; most did not want to speak on camera because they were worried it would affect any funding decision.
Real capital spending on the education sector is half what it was at its peak in 2010.
One reason for the change is that Labour’s Building Schools For The Future programme, which ramped up capital funding in the late 2000s, was scrapped by the Conservative government in 2010.
It is more important to look at trends, as spending of this nature is generally bumpy because capital projects are long- term and costs do not come at regular intervals.
Comparing the last two decades, it is clear that there was a greater commitment to capital investment in schools under Labour.
The current government has pledged £19.4bn of capital funding to support the education sector over the next three years, but a large chunk of this investment is for further education, not schools.
Shadow education secretary Bridget Phillipson said schools are facing “extraordinary challenges” and parents are “right to be worried”.
She said many schools are “not fit for the future” and teachers cannot focus on education if they are “having to manage inadequate facilities”.
Ms Phillipson said: “This isn’t just about fixing immediate problems.
“It should be about making sure all of our children have a brilliant environment in which to learn because they need that if we are really going to drive up standards in all our schools and make sure that children get the best start in life.”
The education secretary said the prime minister “genuinely means it” when he says education is a priority and a silver bullet.
Asked if she is taking on the job at a particularly challenging time, Ms Keegan said the role is a “privilege” and she is “delighted” education has been singled out for funding.
Ramesh lives in fear every day. A police siren is enough to alarm him.
He’s one of up to 400,000 visa overstayers in the UK, one lawyer we spoke to believes.
It’s only an estimate because the Home Office has stopped collecting figures – which were unreliable in the first place.
Britain is being laughed at, one man told us, “because they know it’s a soft country”.
‘Ramesh’ came to the UK from India
We meet Ramesh (not his real name) at a Gurdwara, a Sikh place of worship, where he goes for food and support.
He insists he can’t return to India where he claims he was involved in political activism.
Ramesh says he came to the UK on a student visa in 2023, but it was cancelled when he failed to continue his studies after being involved in a serious accident.
He tells us he is doing cash-in-hand work for people who he knows through the community where he is living and is currently working on a house extension where he gets paid as little as £50 for nine hours labouring.
“It’s very difficult for me to live in the UK without my Indian or Pakistani community – also because there are a lot of Pakistani people who give me work in their houses for cleaning and for household things,” he adds.
‘What will become of people like us?’
Anike has lived in limbo for 12 years.
Now living in Greater Manchester, she came to the UK from Nigeria when her sister Esther was diagnosed with a brain tumour – she had a multi-entry visa but was supposed to leave after three months.
Esther had serious complications from brain surgery and says she is reliant on her sister for care.
Immigration officials are in touch with her because she has to digitally sign in every month.
Anike has had seven failed applications for leave to remain on compassionate grounds refused but is now desperate to have her status settled – afraid of the shifting public mood over migration.
“Everybody is thinking ‘what will become of people like us?'” she adds.
‘It’s a shambles’
The government can’t say with any degree of accuracy how many visa overstayers there are in Britain – no data has been collated for five-and-a-half years.
But piecing together multiple accounts from community leaders and lawyers the picture we’ve built is stark.
Immigration lawyer Harjap Singh Bhangal told us he believed there could be several hundred thousand visa overstayers currently in Britain.
He says: “At this time, there’s definitely in excess of about 200,000 people overstaying in the UK. It might even be closer to 300,000, it could even be 400,000.”
Asked what evidence he has for this he replies: “Every day I see at least one overstayer, any immigration lawyers like me see overstayers and that is the bulk of the work for immigration lawyers.
“The Home Office doesn’t have any accurate data because we don’t have exit controls. It’s a shambles. It’s an institution where every wall in the building is cracked.”
The number of those who are overstaying visas and working cash in hand is also virtually impossible to measure.
‘They know Britain is a soft country’
“They’re laughing at us because they know Britain is a soft country, where you won’t be picked up easily,” says the local man we’ve arranged to meet as part of our investigation.
We’re in Kingsbury in northwest London – an area which people say has been transformed over the past five years as post-Brexit visa opportunities opened up for people coming from South Asia.
‘Mini-Mumbai’
The man we’re talking to lives in the community and helps with events here. He doesn’t want to be identified but raises serious questions about visa abuse.
“Since the last five years, a huge amount of people have come in this country on this visiting visa, and they come with one thing in mind – to overstay and work in cash,” he says.
“This area is easy to live in because they know they can survive. It looks like as if you are walking through mini-Mumbai.”
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‘The system is more than broken’
‘It’s taxpayers who are paying’
And he claims economic migrants are regularly arriving – who’ve paid strangers to pretend they’re a friend or relative in order to obtain a visitor visa to get to Britain.
He says: “I’ve come across so many people who have come this way into this country. It’s widespread. When I talk to these people, they literally tell me, ‘Oh, someone is coming tomorrow, day after tomorrow, someone is coming’.
“Because they’re hidden they may not be claiming benefits, but they can access emergency healthcare and their children can go to school.
“And who is paying for it? It’s the taxpayers who are paying for all this,” says the man we’ve met in north London.
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A Home Office spokesperson said: “We will not tolerate any abuse of our immigration system and anyone found to be breaking the rules will be liable to have enforcement action taken against them.
“In the first year of this government, we have returned 35,000 people with no right to be here – a 13% rise compared to the previous year.
“Arrests and raids for illegal working have soared to their highest levels since records began, up 63% and 51%.”
The government can’t say with accuracy how many visa overstayers there are in Britain – no data has been collated for five-and-a-half years.
Sky News has spoken to immigration lawyers about the numbers, and one believes there could be as many as 400,000 living across the country.
Harjap Singh Bhangal described the situation as a “shambles”.
“The Home Office doesn’t have any accurate data because we don’t have exit controls. It’s a shambles. It’s an institution where every wall in the building is cracked,” he told Sky’s Lisa Holland.
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The visa overstayers in ‘soft’ Britain
Why doesn’t the government know?
The Home Office used to gather data on visa overstayers by effectively checking a list of passport numbers associated with visas against a list of passport numbers of people leaving the UK, taken from airlines and other international travel providers.
If there was a passport number match in the arrivals and departures part of their database, that person was recorded to have left when they should have. If there wasn’t, they were a potential overstayer.
They stopped producing the figures because a combination of Brexit and COVID added complications that made the Home Office conclude they wouldn’t be able to get to a reliable number using the same method.
It’s now four and a half years since EU citizens had freedom of movement to the UK revoked, and more than three and a half years since pandemic-era travel restrictions ended.
And yet we are still waiting to see what a new method might look like.
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The old method wasn’t perfect. If someone changed their passport while in the UK, for example, or if the airline or individual entered the number wrong when they were leaving, there wouldn’t be a match.
The Home Office regarded the statistics as likely overestimating the true number of overstayers, and the Office for National Statistics designated the figures as “experimental” rather than “official” statistics, meaning the conclusions should be treated with caution. But they were a reasonable best guess.
With all that in mind, between April 2016 and March 2020 upwards of 250,000 people were flagged as potential overstayers, equivalent to 63,000 per year.
That’s more than the 190,000 people who are recorded to have arrived in the UK on small boats since 2018.
It represents 3.5% of the seven million visas that expired over that period, so at least 96.5% of people left when they should.
Other Home Office data reveals that more than 13 million visas were issued between 2020 and the end of June 2025, including a record 3.4 million in 2023.
But what we don’t know is how many have expired, which means it’s difficult for us to even guess how many people might have overstayed.
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