Edinburgh council has confirmed that building defects and flaws have been uncovered in all 17 schools closed for safety reasons, as fears grow that some may not reopen until the autumn.
Andrews Burns, the city’s council leader, said some of the buildings could be closed in the longer term but said money spent on rehousing the 7,600 children affected was already being “clawed back” from the private finance firm that built the schools.
The council is finalising plans to relocate 3,200 pupils still without a school by next Tuesday, and on Thursday all those at three affected secondaries returned to their buildings for the first time this week.
Those three schools were only partly refurbished under the PFI contract, but the majority of the 10 primary schools, five secondaries and two additional needs schools affected were totally rebuilt by the PFI firm Edinburgh Schools Partnership.
With 2,000 senior pupils about to start their exams, the council has already postponed practical exams in some subjects, including modern languages, and is considering offers of classrooms and exam space from Edinburgh and Napier universities and the Scottish parliament.
Burns told BBC Radio Scotland it was far from clear when the schools would all fully reopen. The Edinburgh Evening News cited sources as saying some schools may remain closed until after the summer holidays to allow for essential and substantial repairs.
“Early indications are that there is evidence of some fault at all the schools but it’s too early to say how that will physically impact in terms of the length of closure for each of the individual 17 schools,” Burns said. “Some schools will be affected in a small way and other schools might be affected in the longer term.”
It remains unclear exactly what faults have been uncovered. After discovering that wall ties and header ties – which securely bind brick exterior walls to the main structure – were missing in two primary schools and then two secondary schools, the council ordered ESP to do full structural and material surveys to uncover other possible flaws.
The council will withhold this month’s £1.5m fee to ESP, which stands to make nearly £530m from the 32-year contract signed under Labour’s public private partnership programme in 2001.
It is expected that the full penalty imposed on ESP could be far larger. Council officials are compiling a detailed costs breakdown and preparing for a vigorous legal battle to recover their costs. ESP, which has accepted it is liable, will be penalised for every day that a school is closed.
Burns told BBC Radio Scotland: “We will be making sure that that money is reclaimed. That will be absolutely the cost to Edinburgh Schools Partnership and will not cost the Edinburgh taxpayer a penny.”
The Evening News quoted Gavin Corbett, a Scottish Green party councillor, as saying: “My understanding is that all 17 schools have issues about their construction to some extent but that the scale of those problems and the consequences vary school to school.
“This might mean that some schools are safe to reoccupy fairly quickly but, at worst, it could be a number of weeks before they get the all-clear.”
A council spokesman said: “Edinburgh Schools Partnership are continuing with their programme of inspections, which began on Friday evening, and will report back with results in due course.”
