Could we really do any worse?

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Leaving aside the colourful language with which the English Education Secretary expressed herself in an unguarded moment yesterday, what came through was a belief that parents should be extremely grateful to the current government for acting after previous governments had done nothing about the issue. If you assume, as the English constitution does, that a new Prime Minister equals a new government, and that a new government cannot be held responsible for the actions of its predecessors, then she almost has half a point. In the real universe, the one most of us inhabit, it’s rather more clear that the problem has been building up for years, and that successive Tory governments have cut back school building and refurbishment. At the moment it’s perceived as being primarily an English problem, but that is at least partly down to the fact that the English government has been slow and reluctant to share information about its findings. And when it comes to putting things right, we will come up against the fact that English spending on rectification works directly impacts the amount available in Wales, through the application of the Barnett formula. It’s hard to believe that similar construction methods weren’t used as widely in Wales as in England, and that there aren’t more problems waiting to be exposed.

That rectification will be costly, on which note Sunak wants us to be grateful, apparently, that he only cut the rate of building new or replacement schools down to 50 a year when he was Chancellor, a level in line with what had happened under the previous (also Tory) administration, and despite the fact that he was being told that the government needed to plan to replace at least 400 a year. Even that higher figure is inadequate to meet the need. England, we are told, has 22,000 schools: assuming that the planned lifetime of each school is 40 years, then 550 need to be replaced every year just to stand still. A replacement rate of 50 every year implies a planned average building lifetime of 440 years. In Wales, there are around 1470 schools; if the replacement rate were to match that in England (<0.25% per annum), there would be a similar requirement for buildings to last hundreds of years.

Whilst this might appear an entirely normal expectation to Wykehamists like Sunak (where some buildings date back to 14^th Century) or Old Etonians (some date back to 1440), it really isn’t applicable to the schools most children attend. There certainly are many buildings more than a century old (indeed, my old primary school was built in 1908 and is still in use) and, arguably, there is no great rush to replace them all on grounds of imminent collapse (although I still remember the incident in the late 1950s when the ceiling in one of our classrooms fell down – we had some time off while they assessed the rest). They were built to last. But whether schools designed and built in an era when children sat at individual desks in neat rows in strictly delineated classes are still entirely suitable for delivering the modern curriculum is a more complex question, to say nothing of the number of them which have some classes in demountable buildings installed as a ‘temporary’ measure decades ago. The problems which have emerged over the past week are largely in the (comparatively) newest schools, built from the 1960s on, which were deliberately built not to last that long in order to save on building costs at the time (and, although the problem identified is with the concrete, it would be a mistake to blithely assume that that was the only lifetime-limiting factor with the materials and methods used). The extent to which building cheaply to last just a few decades makes sense depends largely on whether there is a long term plan in place for eventual replacement. And there isn’t, and never has been. That isn’t just a Tory problem; governments of all colours have just assumed that the quoted lifespan was some sort of guaranteed minimum, rather than an accurate assessment, and made no plans for a rolling programme of rebuilding. It makes the economic projections for government expenditure look ‘better’ (i.e. lower), although it does somewhat divorce them from reality when this sort of need arises.

It’s not entirely unfair of the Welsh government to say that their ability to deal with the problem is constrained by London, although that’s not something which the perpetually and professionally angry leader of the Welsh Tories is ever likely to admit. They have, perhaps, been too ready to do nothing until England suddenly announced the problem, but there is little that they can do about the funding issue until England acts. And Hunt’s statement that they will do whatever it takes as long as it doesn’t cost any more tells us already that English action will be inadequate. Both questions (waiting for England to lead on identifying the problem, and depending on English decisions for funding) underline the issue at the heart of ‘devolution’; real power remains elsewhere. There is, of course, no guarantee than an independent Welsh government would have done any better (although it couldn’t have done much worse). But we in Wales wouldn’t be able to blame anyone else, and would have to take responsibility both for the problem and fixing it. That would surely be an improvement on where we are now.