Downing Street said the total number was expected to be in the hundreds rather than the thousands, with the vast majority not impacted
The Prime Minister has acknowledged that hundreds more schools in England could be affected by crumbling concrete. The update comes as Rishi Sunak faces accusations he failed to fund a programme to replace ageing classrooms.
Mr Sunak said: "New information came to light relatively recently and it’s important that once it had, that the Government acted on it as swiftly as possible. Of course I know the timing is frustrating, but I want to give people a sense of the scale of what we are grappling with here: there are around 22,000 schools in England and the important thing to know is that we expect that 95% of those schools won’t be impacted by this.
Meanwhile, a former top official at the Department for Education suggested Mr Sunak had declined a request for funding to rebuild more schools while he was chancellor. Jonathan Slater, who was permanent secretary at the Department for Education from May 2016 to August 2020, said the Treasury knew there was a “critical risk to life” if the schools programme was not funded.
But Mr Sunak insisted that 50 schools a year was in line with what had taken place over the previous decade. He told reporters Mr Slater’s attack on his record was “completely and utterly wrong”. She said Mr Sunak "bears huge culpability for his role in this debacle”, adding: “Ministers need to come clean about the number of schools affected, what they knew, and when they knew, about the risks posed by Raac so that parents can be reassured their children are safe at school.”
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