The education secretary, Gillian Keegan, has risked angering schools a day after a sweary outburst landed her in trouble, this time claiming education leaders who had not responded to a survey about whether they were affected by crumbling concrete should “get off their backsides”.
Her comments in a radio interview came a day after she was forced to apologise after being caught swearing on camera while expressing frustration about the crisis surrounding reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete (Raac) in schools, claiming that “everyone else has sat on their arse” while she tried to fix the problem.
Keegan told Jeremy Vine on BBC Radio 2 on Tuesday: “The annoying bit, and this was probably a bit of my frustration yesterday, is despite asking since March 2020, there’s 5% of schools or responsible bodies that have not responded to the survey. Now, hopefully all this publicity will make them get off their backsides.
“But what I would like them to do is to respond because I want to be the secretary of state that knows exactly in every school where there is Raac and takes action.”
She added: “We’ve written to them quite a few times and we’ve also set up a call centre to phone them up to ask them to do it and they still haven’t. So we have written to them yesterday and given them until the end of the week.”
The Department for Education said Keegan had not meant to say schools were to blame, as “responsible bodies”, meaning councils, academy chains and similar organisations received the questionnaires and were responsible for returning them.
In response, the National Education Union (NEU) said that laying any responsibility for the concrete crisis at the door of schools was “outrageous”.
Daniel Kebede, the general secretary of the NEU, said: “It is outrageous of the education secretary to lay any responsibility for the Raac crisis at the door of schools. The fact is that the Department for Education has dragged its heels over many years on this issue.
“The government has failed to show leadership on this issue for very many years.”