Shadow Justice Secretary Steve Reed has criticised the government’s last-minute closure of hundreds schools over safety concerns relating to the use of collapse-prone aerated concrete in their buildings.
He said: “Just days before the start of term, parents will be finding out that there is no school for their kids to go to because they’ve been closed down because the government was so incompetent and neglectful that they did nothing, despite a series of warnings over very many years.” Report by Buseld. Like us on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/itn and follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/itn
He said: “Just days before the start of term, parents will be finding out that there is no school for their kids to go to because they’ve been closed down because the government was so incompetent and neglectful that they did nothing, despite a series of warnings over very many years.” Report by Buseld. Like us on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/itn and follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/itn
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NewsTranscript
00:00 My colleague, Bridget Philipson, who's the shadow secretary of state for education, has
00:04 raised concerns about this kind of concrete and the dilapidated state of our schools over
00:09 150 times, including a debate that was held in Parliament in the spring of this year.
00:15 Now, Nick Gibb was there. How on earth can he say, as an education minister, he didn't
00:19 know this was a problem? He should have acted all that time ago to start to repair the damage
00:25 that potentially was going to be done if they left this concrete in place. But since he
00:29 didn't, he could easily have taken action at the beginning of the summer holidays and
00:34 put in place measures that would have meant that there were alternative provision available
00:38 for students whose schools are affected. But instead of that, today, just days before the
00:42 start of term, parents will be finding out that there is no school for their kids to
00:47 go to because they've been closed down because the government was so incompetent and neglectful
00:52 that they did nothing despite a series of warnings over very many years.
00:56 Now we're calling on the government to publish a list of all of those schools that are affected
01:00 so that we can see the scale of the problem. But beyond that, we want to have a look at
01:05 the condition status of all of our schools so that headteachers, parents, all of us that
01:10 are concerned about education can see exactly what's going on with our schools.