“Three and a half weeks ago, there was nothing here,” said James Saunders, the headteacher of Honywood school, looking with pride – and disbelief – at the scene unfolding in front of him. “It was a field!”
Before us is a brand new school, built in the space of six weeks – a temporary home for the 800 pupils at Honywood in Coggeshall, Essex, one of the schools most severely affected by the recent concrete crisis that threw the start of the new term across England into chaos.
To an unwitting observer, it looks like the kind of temporary structure used to accommodate upmarket hospitality at major sporting events, and indeed the same structures have been used at the Wimbledon tennis championships and the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix.
For Saunders, it is a near miracle – the result of hours and hours of extra work – after an out-of-the-blue call from the Department for Education (DfE) at the end of the summer holiday ordered schools with reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete (Raac) to close affected buildings as a matter of urgency because of the risk of collapse.
Saunders calls his new school Space City and is hoping the change of environment will galvanise and inspire pupils, who have already weathered the pandemic, as they move out of their tired 1960s red-brick buildings into the modular blocks of fresh white, air-conditioned classrooms.
The temporary school has been erected on Honywood’s playing fields (“The PE department is not very pleased,” says Saunders) and when we visit, there are still dozens of builders in hi-vis jackets putting the finishing touches to the £3m development.
The original Honywood building is riddled with Raac, and there is likely to be asbestos too. Photograph: Graeme Robertson/The Guardian
Piles of air-conditioning units, pipes and insulation have gradually diminished as the build nears completion. A thick rubber carpet surrounds the building, covering what were football and rounders pitches. The two blocks with 11 classrooms in each will soon be fully functional, allowing all pupils back in school after half-term.
It is the result of “moonshot thinking”, said Saunders, “making the impossible possible”. Each new classroom is named after a planet and a competition has been running to come up with a new logo.
The original Honywood building is riddled with Raac, and there is likely to be asbestos too. Almost half of the entire school estate was condemned overnight, taped off and ruled unsafe, including 22 classrooms, toilets, the counselling room, medical room, and numerous other offices.
“We knew about the Raac,” said Saunders. The school was built at a time when the lightweight concrete was widely used in the construction of public buildings. The school had received and completed a Raac questionnaire from the DfE as the government tried to establish the scale of the problem. A subsequent survey said it was non-critical.
Then, the week before the new school term was due to begin, everything…
2023-10-14 02:00:36
Post from www.theguardian.com
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