Publish list of danger schools or face Commons vote, says Labour

“I am concerned that we don't yet know the full extent of all of this.

"There are reports that engineers are being sent into schools to do further assessments around the condition, so I think it is important that we get to the bottom of all of this.

“This comes back to sticking plasters. It's right that the Government put in place mitigations to keep children safe, but one of the first actions of an incoming Conservative government in 2010 was to cancel Labour’s school re-building programme.

“And here we are 13 years on and the chickens have come home to roost.”

Speaking to Camilla Tominey, she continued: “The last Labour government had a major school re-building programme and it was the Conservatives who cancelled that plan that we had that would have meant that every single secondary school in England would have been rebuilt or significantly refurbished by 2020.

“If that had happened, we wouldn't be having this same conversation now about some of those secondary schools that are sadly not going to be re-opening or re-opening fully as planned this week.

“But alongside that, many of the schools in question have a length of time that the schools were intended to be built for, they've long since passed that natural life and I think it is frankly negligent that the Government have time and again cut the funding for school re-building.

“They have just failed consistently to be upfront about the scale of the challenge we face.

"I've been raising this with ministers for months and months and months. And they've known for a very long time about the need for action.

“This last minute scramble really should have been avoided. It's not fair for parents, and it's certainly not fair for school leaders who are trying to get everything back up and running at the start of the new term.”

On Labour’s proposal to drop tax breaks for private schools, she denied it was “the politics of envy: “No, it's about making sure that we're investing in our state schools where the vast majority of children go to school.

“The Independent Institute for Fiscal Studies concluded that Labour's plans to end the tax breaks the private schools enjoy, that would raise between £1.3 billion to £1.5 billion pounds a year.

“I think that is a considerable sum of money. We would use that money to deliver more teachers into our classrooms, better mental health support for our children, and rising standards in all of our state schools.

“I see no good reason why private schools continue to enjoy these tax breaks. And I hope the Chancellor might at some point decide to act and end those tax breaks so that we can prioritise state education.

“That's what a Labour government would be doing right now.”

Responding to Phillipson, a Conservative spokesman told GB News: “This is the usual brand of attempted politicking we’ve come to expect from Sir Keir’s Labour. The facts are clear:

“Labour were warned about this when they were last in office and did nothing; they ignored the issue in opposition; and now it’s in the news they’ve decided they’re interested.

“In the meantime, in Labour-run Wales they are recklessly sending students back to school without checking they are safe, leaving parents in the dark.

"This government has already supported 50 schools to put RAAC mitigations in place and we are working to fix these issues as soon as possible, supporting parents and getting children back to school.”