Labour demand govt publish list of schools affected by RAAC
Shadow Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson says the Labour Party will "force a vote in Parliament" to make the government publish a "full list" of all schools which have been affected by crumbling RAAC concrete. More than 100 schools and colleges have been told by the Department for Education to fully or partially shut buildings following the recent collapse of a beam previously considered safe. Report by Blairm. Like us on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/itn and follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/itn
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00:00 I'm deeply concerned that we're going to see further disruption at the start of the school term.
00:03 Children have already faced such disruption to their education with the pandemic and then
00:07 with the industrial action that ministers failed to stop as soon as they should.
00:12 What we need to see now is a full list of all the schools published so that parents
00:15 can have absolute confidence about what's going on and all of the documents associated with it.
00:20 That's why if the government don't do it, this week we'll force a vote in Parliament
00:23 to get that list of schools released.
00:25 I believe we should have the full list published.
00:27 I cannot understand why ministers refuse to do so.
00:29 There's a complete lack of transparency about all of this.
00:32 And I'm also concerned that we've seen more reports that engineers are being sent into
00:36 further schools to assess the scale of what is going on.
00:39 The government need to be upfront about this.
00:41 Ministers should come clean to parents.
00:42 But we do have to remember that one of the first acts of an incoming Conservative government
00:46 in 2010 was to cancel the Labour school rebuilding programme.
00:49 They haven't been investing in our schools estate and the reason that we're developing
00:53 all of these problems is because of a consistent failure over the last 13 years.
00:57 I think there can be no greater a defining image of the last 13 years of the Conservatives'
01:01 education policy than children sat in classrooms with metal props literally stopping the ceilings
01:06 from falling in on their heads.