Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, whether the costs of the removal of RAAC in schools will be reimbursed.

It is the responsibility of those who run schools – academy trusts, local authorities and voluntary-aided school bodies – to manage the safety and maintenance of their schools and to alert the department if there is a serious concern with a building. It has always been the case that where the department is made aware a building may pose an immediate risk, immediate action is taken.

The department will spend what it takes to keep pupils safe. Ministers and officials have regular discussions with colleagues from HM Treasury on a range of issues. The department will fund emergency mitigation work needed to make buildings safe, including installing alternative classroom space where necessary.

The department will fund refurbishment projects, or rebuilding projects where these are needed, to remove RAAC from the school estate. Schools and colleges will either be offered capital grants, or rebuilding projects through the School Rebuilding Programme. The department will set out further details for affected schools and colleges in due course.

The department recognises that some responsible bodies will already have carried out emergency mitigation works, where RAAC was deemed ‘critical,’ based on the advice of the department’s surveys or from other qualified professionals, and in most cases we will reimburse these costs.

Prior to 31 August, the point at which the department’s advice on the risks of RAAC changed, some responsible bodies or schools may also have chosen to take action on RAAC in their buildings where it was not deemed critical, and others may have chosen to go further and removed RAAC entirely. In these cases, as with any other capital works, the responsible bodies will have taken decisions as part of their own estate strategy, based on their assessment of any professional advice they had received and the affordability of the project.

This work would typically have been funded through annual capital funding provided by the department to the sector, or from other sources of funding, such as a responsible body’s reserves. In these cases, the department is not providing additional funding to the funding already provided to responsible bodies to pay for this and other maintenance work.

The department will carefully consider claims submitted by responsible bodies for essential RAAC related works, taking into account the particular circumstances of each case, to determine how the approach above should apply. This includes any claims submitted in relation to Abbey Lane Primary School, and the department will work with the school to understand the scope of the work that has been carried out and its cost.

In addition to the department’s support on RAAC, it has committed £1.8 billion of capital funding for the financial year 2023/24 to improve the condition of school buildings, as part of over £15 billion allocated since 2015. In 2023/24, Sheffield local authority received a school condition allocation of £3,592,655 for improving the condition of its school buildings. Alongside this, the department will transform poor condition buildings at 500 schools and sixth form colleges over the coming decade through the School Rebuilding Programme.

The department will always put the safety and wellbeing of children and staff in schools and colleges at the heart of its policy decisions. The government has taken more proactive action to identify and mitigate RAAC in education settings than the devolved administrations in the UK, or indeed, governments overseas.