Crumbling schools hit by leaks and cold, BBC finds

Many schools are in urgent need of repairs and the buildings they do have are "not fit for purpose", according to a BBC investigation.

At one primary school in Devon, temperatures are so low that children keep gloves and coats on during some lessons. The headteacher says he has been told it does not qualify for extra money for repairs.

The Department for Education (DfE) says pupil and staff safety is "paramount".

According to the government's own figures, the average primary in England needs £300,000 worth of maintenance or upgrades, while the average secondary school needs an estimated £1.5m.

What state are some schools in?

In 2023, a report found about 700,000 children were having to learn in a school that "needs major rebuilding or refurbishment".

It added that about 24,000 school buildings were "beyond [their] original design life" - that's more than a third of all schools in England.

The BBC's Panorama programme has looked into the situation and discovered a secondary school in Dumfries and Galloway in Scotland where draughty windows are stuck together with sticky labels and another in North Yorkshire that teaches some lessons in marquees in a playground, because two thirds of its building became unusable after the discovery of Raac concrete.

At one primary school in Devon, some children work in unheated buildings - nicknamed "the sheds" - which were built in the 1960s and were supposed to be temporary.

"I have to wear gloves and it's really hard to use a pencil or a pen when you've got your gloves on," said Sebastian, who is eight.

Hettie, 10, said: "When it's so, so cold, you start shivering, so your writing goes really wobbly when you're actually writing it because our hands are shaking so much."

Workplace rules say classrooms should be at least 16C.

Who makes sure schools are in good condition?

The rules for school building plans and repairs can be complicated and the job is shared between the UK government, the national assemblies, local councils and schools themselves.

The Welsh and Scottish governments say they don't have figures for their backlogs of school maintenance.

Northern Ireland says its bill has been growing for 15 years and is now estimated at about half a billion pounds.

Department of Education (DfE) says £5.3bn is needed each year to maintain schools in England and a report from Members of Parliament found that that schools in the north of England generally appeared to be in worse condition than those in the south.

What do the authorities say?

At Russell Scott Primary School in Greater Manchester, head teacher Steve Marsland empties out buckets of water collected from leaks around the school whenever it rains.

A spokesperson from the DfE told the BBC that the government was working on the largest survey of school building conditions in Europe - the first of its kind - to "significantly" improve the conditions, targeted where it was needed most.

The spokesperson added that £15bn had been allocated since 2015 for essential maintenance and improvements, including £470m in 2023 "to address school buildings in need of immediate support as quickly as possible".

St Peter's has three classrooms that its head teacher describes as "just sheds"

In addition, the School Rebuilding Programme, which began in 2021, commits the government to rebuilding 500 schools in England, both primary and secondary, over the next 10 years.

However, in England, after three years, only four schools have been rebuilt and the DfE said that progress with the School Rebuilding Programme had been affected by global events like the war in Ukraine.

In Wales, the government says it spent £2.3bn over the past 10 years rebuilding and refurbishing schools.

Meanwhile, the Scottish government provided £1bn of funding to the Learning Estate Investment Programme (LEIP), which started in 2019.