Thousands of children affected by school closures in Edinburgh have had to be spread between 61 schools, nurseries, early learning centres and a university while engineers fix their potentially dangerous school buildings.
Announcing that it had now found places for all those affected, the council said it had used more than 70 buses to transport children across the city since the crisis began as schools were due to return from their Easter break, in what it described as a “huge logistical exercise”.
The council disclosed that the number of children affected by the emergency closure of 17 schools had risen from 7,600 to 8,340 because 740 nursery-aged children needed to be relocated to manage the loss of classrooms.
The council said16 temporary rooms for first and second-year pupils at the Royal High school has been installed and 390 pupils had been moved from Firrhill secondary at Napier university.
With indications that some schools could remain closed until the summer holidays, city officials were unable to say when those pupils would return to their usual schools.
The crisis, caused by the discovery that the builders Miller Construction had failed to use standard “wall ties” to secure exterior brick walls at four schools, has led to a row over the widespread use of private finance in the public sector.
With pressure mounting from education sector unions, the first minister, Nicola Sturgeon, and parents for a formal inquiry, the city council has withheld this month’s £1.5m fee to Edinburgh Schools Partnership, the consortium which built or refurbished the 17 sites.
Jim McCafferty, a director of Structural Engineers Registration, an industry standards body which is backed by the Scottish government, said the system of self certification used at the 17 projects, where the builders were allowed to certificate their own work as up to standard, was too open to abuse.
Andrew Burns, the council leader, had insisted that self-certification was the approved and normal method at the time
ESP has admitted that the independent certifier it used on the schools relied on assurances from the builders that all relevant codes and building standards were followed.
Council officials have defended the council’s oversight of the projects: the defects only came to light because of “intrusive” investigations into the schools’ walls which uncovered hidden faults. Similar faults have been found at a school in Glasgow, built by Miller Construction on a non-PFI contract, and at a school in Argyll and Bute.
McCafferty said an inquiry was needed to establish what type of council supervision had been in place. Construction firms had a vested interest in getting their buildings occupied, and “it is open to the possibility of abuse or mismanagement”, he told BBC’s Good Morning Scotland.
“I think there should be a great deal more traditional supervision of construction. I don’t think it is a simple mistake. I think something serious went wrong in terms of looking carefully at what was being done.”
