Underinvestment in education has resulted in crumbling schools and children learning in freezing conditions – but the crisis runs deeper | Anonymous Teacher
The #RAAC crisis continues in #schools with the Govt. compounding the problem by refusing requests fr #exam help for students in schools where facilities are unusable due to the risk of building collapse....
This story remains a metaphor for how the UK's approach to #infrastructure (cost-cutting & skipped maintenance) is not sustainable.... and as we know this is not an issue limited to schools.
(article also contains a helpful graphic on the RAAC problem)
🚨* I've just happened across this chilling Labour Party advert from 4 years ago, released days after the 2019 General Election was announced.
What this valiant Senior Citizen said then, is even more relevant today. It shows the #UK's rapid 13 year decline under #Tory governance.
Regardless of how some feel about #Starmer, concentrate your mind on how you'd feel come 29th Jan 2025, if you saw a gurning #Sunak stood on the steps of No 10, instead of Sir Keir?
@AnthonyFStevens@riggbeck
Labours stated policy response to the tory economic policies that have blighted the UK...
....is continuing those same disastrous policies
Continuity austerity, more NHS budgets diverted to private healthcare, continuing under-funding schools, - labour wont even commit to making school building safe (#RAAC)
That kind of short-term, stupid, harmful crap is what #tories do ...and #labour and #reeves state they will continue
While #RAAC revelations raised the profile of #infrastructure problems & lack of maintenance across the #publicsector, especially in #health & #education, if you're expecting #JeremyHunt to fund a massive programme of remedial works, then you're likely to be disappointed.
Rather than dealing with our crumbling buildings, he'll be setting out how to increase #taxes on most of us (by allowing 'fiscal drag' - not using allowances - to continue) while helping the rich by cutting #InheritanceTax!
And the #RAAC crisis gets worse, with another 61 building's across over 40 #schools found to be have a RAAC problem, bringing the total 214 buildings....
And another 18 #hospitals have also confirmed they have RAAC in their buildings.
So, weak regulation (damn all that red tape), cost cutting (hey, 'efficiency gains'), and corruption (my mates' firm is the best contractor), all add up to yet another failure of governance...
As Torsten Bell notes, a key problem behind so many issues is a lack of #investment - from the #NHScrisis to #RAAC in #schools, from our #productivity problems, to the state of our #infrastructure; so much would be different if the UK invested at the rate more normal across #Europe.
But notably behind the UK's seeming short-termism is, to me, a wider problem:
in the UK we have just stopped believing in the future... with devastating effects across society!
📰 York Castle Museum partially closed after #RAAC discovery
Surprised we haven't seen more headlines like these: #museums all over the country must be built out of the reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete (RAAC) they've discovered propping up the gallery ceilings in #York.
The concrete has a life-span of 30 years and we've been cheerily putting it in just about everything between the 1950s until the mid-90s. :yikes:
Läser om #RAAC: En sorts lättbetong, populär i Storbritannien och resten av imperiet sedan 50-talet. Den har flera fördelar, som att vara billig, lätt och okänslig mot brand. Sa jag att den är billig?
En nackdel är hållfastheten över tid, särskilt om man slarvar med underhållet. Och efter lama varningar de sista åren har RAAC-krisen nu blommat upp. Massor av offentliga byggnader stängs: Sjukhus, skolor, universitet, brandstationer, teatrar … En nationell kris.
As international architects & civil engineers become conversant with details of the UK's #RAAC, a clear consensus is emerging:
its a particularly UK crisis.
RAAC & its associated building components have been in wide use across the world, predating widened UK usage in the 60s/70s... but other countries seem to have better regulations on use, better installation & better maintenance.
The general conclusion is its the UK's cost-cutting & miss-use of RAAC that is to blame.
Hundreds of schools, hospitals, and other public buildings made from RAAC, a cheap, lightweight concrete, have to close—the victims of quick fixes and decades of cost-cutting.
No-one round here is going to be surprised that the condition of #roads is deteriorating - its just one more aspect of the toxic Americanisation of the UK's #economy.
JK Galbraith once (famously) characterised the US as exhibiting 'private affluence & public squalor' and this is increasingly what we see in the UK - the continued delaying of #maintenance has wider impacts than just the #RAAC crisis
Most unwelcome Hot Take of the Day so far is from Eamonn Holmes - ably assisted by intellectual vacuum Lia Nici - on #RAAC:
"Eamonn Holmes finds Blair's "Education, Education, Education" too complex a slogan to understand, and Tory MP Lia Nici reckons that his funding of education is where the "problem" started, as it encouraged more people to go to university. "
from the other place
PS - how is repeating a single word too hard to understand? 🙄 #UKPolitics#Education
'The whole current system, where dangerously crumbling concrete is kept in place because fixing it would require some borrowing, is predicated on a kind of deficit fetishism that treats reducing government borrowing as more important than almost anything else, including teaching children'!