Asbestos in schools: we need urgent action now to protect teachers and pupils

Sadly, asbestos is not just a problem of the past – the Department for Education (DfE) Asbestos Management Assurance Process (AMAP) found that 81 per cent of schools in England still contain asbestos¹, and the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) reports that more than 5,000 people each year die from diseases related to asbestos, including more than 2,250 from mesothelioma, a type of cancer that is solely caused by asbestos exposure².

Photograph: iStock/SashaFoxWalters

This includes around 200 teachers who have died of mesothelioma since 2000. While the headline rate appears to have peaked, the numbers of teachers dying each year continues to rise³.

This number is likely to be a substantial underestimate as occupation is only recorded in death statistics for deaths under the age of 75, yet many mesothelioma cases are diagnosed much older than this. There are no reliable figures for school support staff, and none for people who die as a result of asbestos exposure while at school as a pupil. It has been suggested that for each teacher death, as many as seven pupils could die.

Around 24,000 school buildings in England are well beyond their initial design life expectancy and are in increasingly poor condition. Most, if not all, of these will also contain asbestos.

The current approach of management in situ relies on asbestos being managed perfectly and that there are no accidental releases. However, there are many examples of schools not managing asbestos correctly, as demonstrated by numerous HSE prosecutions over the past decade.

In addition, the 2023 HSE schools asbestos inspection programme resulted in one-third of schools being found to be in material breach of the Control of Asbestos Regulations 2012, and in seven per cent of schools inspected the issue was serious enough for an enforcement notice to be served due to deficiencies in management.

If replicated across all schools in England, this would represent over 1,000 schools with poor enough asbestos management practices to require formal intervention, potentially putting hundreds of thousands of pupils and staff at risk of exposure.

In addition, the management in situ approach is very costly in terms of the financial burden of managing a highly dangerous material.

NASUWT also has concerns around the culture of secrecy about asbestos in many schools. For example, it is good practice to label asbestos-containing materials to prevent accidental exposure, but this rarely happens in schools, so as not to ‘cause worry’.

Poor condition of schools

The poor condition of school buildings is another factor, as it makes it more likely that any asbestos will also be in poor condition.

In recent years, funding for school buildings has not matched the amount DfE estimates it needs, contributing to the estate’s deterioration. Between 2016/17 and 2022/23, DfE spent on average £2.3 billion a year, with most of this (76 per cent) for maintenance and repair and the remaining 24 per cent to carry out major rebuilding and refurbishment projects.

In its Spending Review 2020 case, drawing on external estimates, DfE reported that £7 billion could represent the best-practice level of annual capital funding. It recommended £5.3 billion a year as the capital funding required to maintain schools and mitigate the most serious risks of building failure once it had expanded its School Rebuilding Programme.

Since it would take time to achieve this expansion, DfE requested an average of £4 billion a year for 2021 to 2025. HM Treasury subsequently allocated an average of £3.1 billion a year. At the rebuild rate instigated by the previous Government, it would take 400 years to rebuild every school in England.

Wayne Bates is a national negotiating official at NASUWT - The Teachers' Union

It is clear that schools will only be truly and permanently safe once all asbestos is removed, and NASUWT has long called for a programme of phased removal of asbestos in schools, recognising that the sheer volume of asbestos would take many years to remove, but at the current rate of rebuilding it could be 400 years before all asbestos-containing schools are rebuilt.

Recommended deadline for removal of asbestos

NASUWT was very pleased when the Work and Pensions Select Committee recommended a 40-year deadline for the removal of asbestos from public buildings, especially as asbestos is not just a problem for schools, but the entire public estate, not to mention commercial and domestic buildings.

Likewise, the recommendation for a central database of asbestos was very welcome to ensure all asbestos is properly catalogued and recorded, allowing for a proper strategic approach to the removal of asbestos.

These recommendations appeared to us to be extremely reasonable.

It was very disappointing that the previous Government rejected both recommendations, kicking the issue further down the line again. We hope that this position will be reviewed by the new Labour Government and it will enact these recommendations so we can put a deadline on removing asbestos from public buildings and finally draw a line under the asbestos issue, once and for all.

Wayne Bates is a national negotiating official at NASUWT – The Teachers’ Union.

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References

1. Department for Education (DfE) (2019) Asbestos Management Assurance Process, July 2019. gov.uk/government/publications/asbestos-data-collections
2. Health and Safety Executive (HSE) (2024) Asbestos-related disease statistics, Great Britain 2024. hse.gov.uk/statistics/assets/docs/asbestos-related-disease.pdf
3. HSE (2024) Mesothelioma mortality by occupation statistics in Great Britain, 2024. tinyurl.com/jr82jxpv