- Written by Hazel Shearing & Susie Luck
- BBC news
Eleven-year-old Elliott was excited to be moving on to middle school this year. He was out to see other children who were due to attend the same Durham school when the government announced that school buildings built with a certain type of concrete would have to close immediately.
Since then, Elliott hasn’t had many opportunities to talk to his new friends or other classmates. His school was one of the schools affected by this announcement.
St Leonards Catholic School was told it would not be able to fully open at the start of term due to the presence of reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete (Raac) on the school grounds.
Elliott didn’t go to school and spent much of this semester taking six hours a day of online classes at home on her mother’s laptop. On his screen are over 150 of his other children logged on to his lesson online, but no one has their camera on, only the teacher is talking.
“I feel very isolated,” Elliott says. “During my free time, I usually watch YouTube in bed.”
Elliott’s mother, Amanda, said her son was looking forward to making new friends. “Not being able to do it in the normal way affected him a lot,” she says.
Elliott will begin full-time in-person learning at a different location next week.
Some grades have been staying in the school building for weeks at a time, but even for them, school life has been far from normal. Children are learning in the gymnasium rather than classrooms, and are using clipboards because there aren’t enough desks.
Nick Hearn, the school trust’s chief executive, said he hoped all children would be “back to some level of face-to-face learning” after half-term.
Chancellor Rishi Sunak told a local radio station that plans for rebuilding St Leonards would start by the end of the year.
It has been almost six weeks since the scale of the Raac crisis first emerged.
The government has also not released updated figures since last month, despite saying it would release updates on the number of schools affected every two weeks.
Latest figures published on September 14 show that 174 schools in England have confirmed cases of Raac, with the substance now considered a safety risk and leading to closures.
Twenty-three of those schools had at least some students learning remotely. Temporary classrooms were required in 29 schools, and 11 schools already had temporary classrooms set up.
Stepney All Saints Church of England secondary school in east London has closed completely, meaning all 1,400 pupils are learning remotely, but most year groups have since closed. group was reopened.
As the impact became clearer, 180 one-person classrooms and 68 two-person classrooms, as well as toilet blocks, were ordered. The DfE has not said how many units have been delivered so far.
A government spokesperson said: “The majority of schools where Lark was confirmed have reopened and students are continuing to learn as normal.”
“We will continue to support all affected individuals in every way possible, whether through a team of dedicated caseworkers or through capital funding to put in place mitigation measures to minimize disruption to students’ education.” We will continue to support the environment.”
But Raac is not the only source of school infrastructure problems.
The report said more than 93% of schools responded to the DfE survey on asbestos. 80% of them identified it.
Most of Aylesford School in Warwick has been closed due to asbestos. It’s possible there is a Raac, but the building is of a reasonable age, but principal Tim Hodgson won’t know for sure until the asbestos is removed.
More than 30 of the school’s classrooms are currently unusable. The class usually takes turns using his two science labs, of which he has eight remaining. Padlocked classroom desks still contain coffee cups and teaching materials left behind by teachers who had to evacuate just days before the start of the term.
“We’re educators. We’re not project managers or builders. So we need that help, and we need it now,” Tim says.
Aylesford School is on the DfE’s ‘complex cases’ list. Approximately 18 temporary classrooms have been ordered to be installed on the netball courts and are expected to arrive in early November.
‘abandoned’
Siobhan McKenna said her daughter, a student at Aylesford College, was feeling “overwhelmed” with learning from home.
“I’m a single parent, working a full-time job and trying to provide for my daughter, and not being able to help is really, really hard,” she says.
Ms McKenna wants Aylesford’s GCSE students to be able to take advantage of other schools’ practical educational facilities, such as science laboratories.
“What kind of practical lessons can be taught there?” [temporary buildings]? ” she says.
“We feel completely abandoned.”
Jultz Phillips’ daughter Scarlett has been in hospital at Aylesford for several weeks, but her son Jacob, a Year 8 student, remains at home.
Julz has helped other parents who are unable to work from home by caring for their children during the day. But her arrangement now affects the spray tanning business she runs out of her parents’ home.
“We had a wonderful couple come in for their wedding tanning,” says Jolts. “It was a really bad day.
“After getting a spray tan, I walked out soaking wet to sweatshirts and coats spread out on the floor…What I learned from that was to avoid serving customers during school hours if possible. That’s what I’m trying to do.”
Jules feels the children have been “forgotten”.
“They went through two years of COVID, they went through the days of the teacher strike… and now they’re not thinking about us, because who else is going through this? Because there aren’t any,” she says.
“Unless you’re living in this situation right now, you can’t understand what’s going on.”