THE key words in the schools concrete scandal are not “arses” and “fucking.” They are “responsible bodies.”

Education Secretary Gillian Keegan brought swear words into the heart of the debate when she was interviewed by ITV News about what the government was doing to stop post-war schools built with Raac “frothy concrete” from collapsing on kids’ heads.

After the interview Keegan blurted out a mix of four-letter blame and self-pity, saying: “Does anyone ever say: ‘You know what, you’ve done a fucking good job, because everyone else has sat on their arse and done nothing?’ No signs of that, no?”

Keegan kicking off will contribute to the Tories’ forthcoming electoral collapse: they’ve penny-pinched so badly on school buildings that some are in danger of collapsing and crushing kids. 

In a panic, they are now forcing kids back into online teaching before they can be crammed into Portacabins. They knew there was a problem with decaying “Raac” concrete, but have held back the money and are now resorting to desperate last-minute solutions.

Keegan trying to claim she was great and blame other people, her arrogance and contempt, shows a governing class who lash out when asked to do basic things like stopping schools collapsing on children.

But to really understand this story, we should understand who she is trying to blame — and the phrase to focus on isn’t the swearing, it is “responsible bodies.”

Keegan’s colourful language makes great copy, but left some in the media a bit confused. The Guardian said: “It was not clear whether Keegan was referring to her Cabinet contemporaries or her predecessors” when she talked about people “sitting on their arses.”

Keir Starmer also thought this was a Westminster fallout. He said Keegan and her fellow Tories were “trying to blame people within their own teams.”

But this wasn’t just part of the Westminster soap opera, with one minister shouting at another.

Keegan actually said, quite clearly, after the swearing, that when it came to failures in fixing the schools it is the “responsible bodies are absolutely responsible for that.”

She means the local authorities in charge of schools. Once upon a time, Keegan could have said “the local education authorities,” but because schools are now run by a mix of semi-privatised multi-academy trusts (MATs) as well as local education authorities (LEAs), the new jargon label is “responsible bodies.”

Essentially the government is trying to push blame down onto local school management. Even though LEAs and MATs don’t have the budgets to fix schools, the government wants to blame them for not fixing schools. 

This isn’t really a secret. Schools Minister Nick Gibb made clear to journalists that Keegan was trying to blame school building managers for not returning questionnaires on whether they had “frothy concrete” problems. 

The Department for Education is even claiming some school managers who have returned the concrete questionnaire have failed to do so. But the Westminster-based media find it hard to hear this story, because they prefer a Westminster drama to thinking about how schools are actually managed or funded.

The Keegan Manoeuvre works in two ways. Firstly, it passes the buck downwards and blames the victims. The rebuilding budget sits with the Department for Education (DfE), not the LEAs and MATs, but central government gets to blame local authorities with little power.

Secondly — and this is the real scandal here — the government wants to become an “irresponsible body,” giving all the responsibility and none of the cash to the diffuse “responsible bodies.”

Their blame game works all the better because the decades-long experiment of handing over schools to semi-private “academy trusts” means many people — including some of the national media — don’t  understand who runs schools. 

In this confusion, the government hope to slip away from the responsibility. Indeed the National Audit Office (NAO) found that fragmenting schools management meant there is less management of school buildings. 

This June it investigated and found “responsible bodies vary greatly in their ability to manage their estate and how they go about it. Local authorities and larger academy trusts may employ dedicated staff with professional estate management qualifications” who have a good grip, but “by contrast, staff in smaller responsible bodies may cover building issues alongside other duties. As many schools become academies, leading to local authorities no longer directly overseeing schools, estates’ expertise may be diluted.”

The NAO found “some local authorities have responded to greater academisation by reducing the size and profile of their school estates teams and may now lack the necessary capacity and skills. 

“Some stakeholders concerned with buildings issues in the sector have told DfE that estate management practice is poor.”

No party intends undoing this education fragmentation.

The DfE also found the bigger picture on schools building funding was very grim. This goes way beyond “frothy concrete.” The NAO said: “In recent years, funding for school buildings has not matched the amount DfE estimates it needs, contributing to the estate’s deterioration.” 

In 2020 the DfE estimated they needed £7 billion for “best practice” repair and rebuilding. So it cut that figure down to £5.3bn a year to “maintain schools and mitigate the most serious risks of building failure.” 

However, it only asked the Treasury for £4bn, hoping to get the rest of the necessary cash in later years. In response HM Treasury only allocated £3.1bn a year. 

The DfE knows how serious this is. The NAO says: “Since summer 2021, DfE has recognised the significant safety risk across the school estate — its corporate risk register shows as ‘critical and very likely’ the risk that building collapse or failure could cause death or injury.”

The mix of crumbling, neglected schools and Conservative contempt is angering the public and embarrassing formerly supportive media. 

It’s the kind of basic, profound crisis that almost brought Corbyn into government in 2017, and will very likely lead to an absolute collapse of the Tory vote in 2024. 

The last Labour government did refurbish schools that were in a desperate state after years of Thatcherism, but did so by using tax receipts from a booming economy and dodgy “PFI” finance.  

Whether a new, very right-wing Labour government swept into power by a crumbling public realm will lead to rebuilding that realm is very much open to question.