“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.
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 changed. A number of sudden collapses in Raac-constructed buildings that had previously been thought safe prompted the DfE to take immediate action. According to the most recent DfE update, 174 schools in England are confirmed to have Raac so far.
The start of term at Honywood was delayed by a day as the process of sealing off affected parts of the building began and plans for remote/hybrid learning were drawn up.
The year sevens, new to the school after leaving primary, were prioritised for face-to-face learning, alongside year 11s who will sit their GCSEs next summer. Overall, two-fifths of pupils (two year groups) have been learning online at home, prompting “Covid flashbacks” for some pupils, parents and staff, said Saunders.
No more than three year groups have been allowed on site at any one time and a tour of the building shows why. Around every corner there is red and white tape crisscrossed, forbidding entry, and the timetable looks like a complex set of equations worthy of Einstein, with pupils rotating between home and face-to-face learning.
In the meantime, Saunders had to battle DfE red tape to oversee the building of the temporary school. Having seen the impact of Covid on children’s mental health, he knew it was vital to get all children back on site as soon as possible.
It has been a huge effort, an “almost impossible challenge”, which has taken time and energy away from what schools should be doing. The temporary school is expected to be in place for a year while the Raac is made safer, but Saunders says the propping required will be extensive, costly and will have a lifespan of five years at most. He thinks it would make more sense to build a new permanent school instead.
Saunders, who has been headteacher at Honywood for five years, is relentlessly optimistic. He has made the development of the new building an adventure for children, parents and staff. “We used this crisis as an opportunity to bring our community together.”
Parents have been involved in raising money, for although the DfE has promised to foot the bill for repairs and temporary accommodation, there have been additional unexpected expenses – headsets for teachers delivering online lessons and rented space for GCSE food tech students, whose newly redeveloped classrooms were taped off because of Raac safety concerns.
But nationally, learning for some children will have suffered, the disruption – so soon after Covid – will play into the attendance crisis across the country, and parents have had to make further sacrifices to be at home with their children.
“When we first all got the news, a lot of people were almost triggered by the concept of home learning again,” said Sarah Cooper, a parent who has a daughter in year 10 at Honywood. “I have a couple of friends who were definitely stressed out by it.
“It was a bit of a crap moment at the beginning, but the school got right on it and managed to turn it around, not just to get all the children back next week in school, learning, but to make it a massive feelgood experience.”
It is disappointing that the issue was not flagged sooner, Cooper said, but added: “It’s been really exciting to watch this develop. The school has kept us so wonderfully up to date throughout. It’s actually been a really wonderful thing that’s happened in the school community.”
A DfE spokesperson said: “We will spend whatever it takes to keep children safe. The government will fund the emergency mitigation work and longer-term refurbishment or rebuilding projects to rectify the Raac issue.
“Schools and colleges will either be offered capital grants to fund refurbishment work to permanently remove Raac, or rebuilding projects where these are needed, including through the school rebuilding programme.”
