Commenting on the passing of Motion 39 at the Annual Conference of the National Education Union, Dr Mary Bousted, Joint General Secretary of the National Education Union, said:
“All education staff and the children and young people they teach deserve to work and learn in safe, comfortable and fit for purpose premises. Yet, school buildings have been neglected by successive governments since 2010 with capital spending declining by 50% in real terms.
“This failure to invest has simply meant that we have stored up problems for the future.
“For decades the NEU and its predecessor unions have been highlighting the risks to children and staff of working in buildings riddled with asbestos and calling for a programme of systematic phased removal of asbestos from all schools, starting with the most dangerous first.
“Since 1980 more than 400 school teaching professionals have died of mesothelioma in Britain, with 300 having died since 2001. Mesothelioma is an incurable cancer caused by exposure to asbestos and it is totally unacceptable that education staff and children should be put at risk of developing this terrible disease because of the condition of the buildings in which they work and learn.
“The Department for Education should right now be fully focused on retrofitting education buildings to make them safe, sustainable, energy efficient and climate resilient, a task which is even more challenging because of the legacy issues of asbestos and RAAC, which should have been tackled years ago.”
Editor’s Note
Funding: The House of Commons Library Report - School Buildings and Capital Funding (England) - 4 January 2023 CBP-7375.pdfcalculates that between 2009-10 and 2021-22, overall capital spending declined by around 37 per cent in cash terms and 50 per cent in real terms.
Reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete (RAAC) DfE’s latest Annual report DfE consolidated annual report and accounts 2021 to 2022Because of their age profile, schools that contain RAAC are also likely to be the ones that contain asbestos making it both more difficult and expensive to tackle.
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