An entire generation of public buildings requires renewal

For years now the number of schools being refurbished or rebuilt has depressingly failed to keep pace with the deterioration of school estates. England’s 8.4 million state school children are educated in 64,000 buildings, spread across 21,600 individual schools of varying ages and states of (dis)repair. To stand still, the DfE knows full well that we need to rebuild or heavily refurbish between 300 and 400 school buildings per year. What has been achieved in recent years is a fraction of that. We haven’t even been standing still.

Reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete (RAAC) in schools is a critical issue but it is not a new issue. Engineers have been warning of the risks of these life-expired structures for years. Following the collapse of a beam at a primary school in Kent in 2018 – fortunately over a weekend – the DfE identified that RAAC posed a critical risk to safety.

By June of this year, the National Audit Office (NAO) in its damning reports on the condition of England’s school buildings, estimated that two-thirds of schools may have RAAC in some or all of their buildings. This estimate was based on age – specifically, the 14,900 schools with buildings constructed between 1930 and 1990. The same data shows that the current estate has approximately 24,000 buildings (38% of the total) which have buildings that have exceeded their design life.

While extending a building’s lifespan through repair and refurbishment is not uncommon, schools built during the post-war years were only ever expected last 30 or 40 years. As those working in the sector know well, these buildings often have the hard-to-solve problems of structure, layout, overheating, ventilation and asbestos. These buildings make for poor learning environments and some are in conditions that are, frankly, a national disgrace.

Remember, we need at least 300 new school buildings a year just to maintain adequate provision

I say this not as an architect working in the sector, but as a parent. Both of my children attended a school slated for a rebuild under Building Schools for the Future (BSF) but axed by Michael Gove. For more than a decade since, young people have somehow succeeded in spite of, rather than because of, their learning environment. Blocked drains, dreadful stinks, leaking roofs and broken heating have all resulted in closure of spaces in that school. This is a continual headache for the inspirational headteacher who finds herself continuously dealing with building-maintenance issues rather than focusing on children’s education. With her maintenance budget slashed, she actually has to choose which issue is most pressing to address and to fund. This pattern is mirrored nationally, with one survey suggesting two-fifths of schools use buckets when it rains.

Though it is a relief that it hasn’t taken a tragedy, the drastic action the government has taken on RAAC, just days before the start of term, is, many will say, long overdue and appallingly timed. There aren’t hundreds of temporary school buildings awaiting to be deployed overnight to plug the gap, and even those that are available will take weeks to mobilise.

Given it deteriorates over time, when RAAC reaches the end of its lifespan, that is it. Replacing or reinforcing a building’s structure is particularly intrusive and often nonsensical. In many instances, it essentially means a new building. Which is why the DfE recommended to the government that to mitigate further risks posed by RAAC, it needed to expand the School Rebuilding Programme. In fact, quite the opposite has happened.

Despite all the survey information that the DfE has commissioned to give it a much better understanding of the condition of the school estate, Rishi Sunak, as chancellor, cut the school rebuilding programme from 100 schools per year to just 50. Remember, we need at least 300 new school buildings a year just to maintain adequate provision.

At the same time, there is a pressing need to decarbonise the school estate if we are to come anywhere close to meeting our nationally declared targets for carbon reduction. The NAO noted that there is currently no plan to achieve the scale of decarbonisation that is needed for the education estate to make its proportionate contribution.

There are some innovative ideas being trialled. The DfE’s GenZero pathfinder projects are looking to test and implement ways of building schools with significantly lower operational and embodied carbon. Similarly, the EnergyPod concept is an intelligent way of radically improving the efficiency of on-site energy generation for existing schools with minimal invasive works, accompanied by a sliding scale of fabric improvements. And despite the issues identifying schools with RAAC, the DfE is making inroads in gathering and using data and post-occupancy evaluation to inform its thinking.

Existing schools need retrofit approaches that are accessible and achievable. Organisations such as the social enterprise Retrofit Action for Tomorrow (RAFT) with its RIBA MacEwen award-winning retrofit programme in Lewisham are paving the way in providing advice to schools to improve their environmental performance with a heavy emphasis on community education.

But these are all modest initiatives compared to the scale of the challenge, which has been neglected for more than a decade. Those inside the DfE know what needs to be done. The fundamental constraint remains available funding and decisions taken outside of the department. With RAAC, sections of the school estate are now literally crumbling. But the issue goes beyond RAAC and schools. It affects our hospitals, our courthouses, our police stations. Across the public sector, a generation of buildings has gone beyond their intended lifespans. Whichever party forms our government, what RAAC highlights is the need for a sustained programme of investment and renewal of our national infrastructure.

Ben Marston is a director of Jestico + Whiles and co-leads the practice’s education studio. He served eight years as a school governor and is current chair of the NLA Education Expert Panel.