School buildings in England made with certain type of concrete forced to close over safety fears
School buildings in England made with a certain type of concrete that is prone to collapse will be immediately closed over safety fears, the government has announced.
Around 104 schools or “settings” will be disrupted on top of 50 that have already been affected this year.
The Department for Education (DfE) said the “vast majority of schools and colleges will be unaffected by this change” – but Labour criticised the move as “staggering display of Tory incompetence”.
The type of concrete forcing the closures is Reinforced Autoclaved Aerated Concrete, known as RAAC.
It is the same type of concrete that has been found in some hospitals that have been deemed to be unsafe, prompting Health Secretary Steve Barclay to fast-track them into the government’s hospitals-building programme.
Education Secretary Gillian Keegan said: “Nothing is more important than making sure children and staff are safe in schools and colleges, which is why we are acting on new evidence about RAAC now, ahead of the start of term.
“We must take a cautious approach because that is the right thing to do for both pupils and staff.
“The plan we have set out will minimise the impact on pupil learning and provide schools with the right funding and support they need to put mitigations in place to deal with RAAC.”
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Labour’s shadow education secretary Bridget Phillipson said the government was “failing” children by needing to close schools just before the new term started.
“This is an absolutely staggering display of Tory incompetence as they start a fresh term by failing our children again,” she said.
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England’s crumbling schools
“Dozens of England’s schools are at risk of collapse with just days before children crowd their corridors. Ministers have been content to let this chaos continue for far too long.
“It’s long past time the secretary of state got a grip on her department.”
Paul Whiteman, general secretary of school leaders’ union NAHT, also said the “news is shocking, sadly it is not hugely surprising”.
“What we are seeing here are the very real consequences of a decade of swingeing cuts to spending on school buildings,” he said.
“The government is right to put the safety of pupils and staff first – if the safety of buildings cannot be guaranteed, there is no choice but to close them so urgent building work can take place.
“But there is no escaping the fact that the timing of this couldn’t be worse, with children due to return from the summer holidays next week.”
The DfE said the majority of the school sites would remain open for face-to-face learning and only specific parts of buildings closed where RAAC is used.
It said a minority will need to either “fully or partially relocate to alternative accommodation” while mitigations are put in place.
Some hospitals deemed ‘unsafe’ because of RAAC
The department said the government has been aware of RAAC in public sector buildings since 1994 but the issue came to light in 2018, when a roof collapsed at a Kent school.
That year the DfE published guidance for schools stating the need to have “adequate contingencies” in the event of evacuations caused by concerns over the use of RAAC.
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In June this year, the National Audit Office (NAO) said a school collapse in England that causes death or injury was “very likely” – but that the government did not have sufficient information to manage “critical” risks to the safety of pupils and staff.
Around 24,000 school buildings – more than a third of the total number in England – are beyond their estimated design lifespan – with school leaders branding the scale of building safety issues “shocking”.
Questions were also raised about the state of UK hospitals after Mr Barclay said that five new sites would be added to the government’s programme to build 40 new hospitals because the presence of RAAC made them unsafe to operate “beyond 2030”.
Five new sites – Airedale General in Keighley, Queen Elizabeth Hospital in King’s Lynn, Hinchingbrooke near Huntingdon, Leighton Hospital in Cheshire and Frimley Park in Surrey – were added to the programme as a priority.
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Thousands more Afghan nationals may have been affected by another data breach, the government has said.
Up to 3,700 Afghans brought to the UK between January and March 2024 have potentially been impacted as names, passport details and information from the Afghan Relocations and Assistance Policy has been compromised again, this time by a breach on a third party supplier used by the Ministry of Defence (MoD).
This was not an attack directly on the government but a cyber security incident on a sub-contractor named Inflite – The Jet Centre – an MoD supplier that provides ground handling services for flights at London Stansted Airport.
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The flights were used to bring Afghans to the UK, travel to routine military exercises, and official engagements. It was also used to fly British troops and government officials.
Those involved were informed of it on Friday afternoon by the MoD, marking the second time information about Afghan nationals relocated to the UK has been compromised.
It is understood former Tory ministers are also affected by the hack.
Earlier this year, it emerged that almost 7,000 Afghan nationals would have to be relocated to the UK following a massive data breach by the British military that successive governments tried to keep secret with a super-injunction.
Defence Secretary John Healey offered a “sincere apology” for the first data breach in a statement to the House of Commons, saying he was “deeply concerned about the lack of transparency” around the data breach, adding: “No government wishes to withhold information from the British public, from parliamentarians or the press in this manner.”
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The previous Conservative government set up a secret scheme in 2023 to relocate Afghan nationals impacted by the data breach, but who were not eligible for an existing programme to relocate and help people who had worked for the British government in Afghanistan.
The mistake exposed personal details of close to 20,000 individuals, endangering them and their families, with as many as 100,000 people impacted in total.
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A government spokesperson said of Friday’s latest breach: “We were recently notified that a third party sub-contractor to a supplier experienced a cyber security incident involving unauthorised access to a small number of its emails that contained basic personal information.
“We take data security extremely seriously and are going above and beyond our legal duties in informing all potentially affected individuals. The incident has not posed any threat to individuals’ safety, nor compromised any government systems.”
In a statement, Inflite – The Jet Centre confirmed the “data security incident” involving “unauthorised access to a limited number of company emails”.
“We have reported the incident to the Information Commissioner’s Office and have been actively working with the relevant UK cyber authorities, including the National Crime Agency and the National Cyber Security Centre, to support our investigation and response,” it said.
“We believe the scope of the incident was limited to email accounts only, however, as a precautionary measure, we have contacted our key stakeholders whose data may have been affected during the period of January to March 2024.”
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