Asbestos fears over BSF cuts

29 June 2011

The decision to axe the Building Schools for the Future (BSF) programme has meant fewer amounts of deadly asbestos will be removed from schools.

That was one of the more disturbing consequences of Education Secretary Michael Gove's controversial scrapping of the multi-billion pound BSF scheme, delegates at the NASUWT's latest health and safety seminar heard.

Introduced by the previous Labour Government, BSF would have renovated and re-built thousands of schools, many of which still contain the deadly legacy of asbestos.

Bob Johnson, National Official for Salaries, Pensions and Conditions of Service and a leading expert on asbestos within the union movement, said the NASUWT did not share the view that asbestos was safe if managed correctly.

He told the seminar: “The Health and Safety Executive's view is that this material is safe if managed properly. We do not share that.

“BSF would have got rid of a lot of the asbestos present in schools at the moment. But the programme is now heavily truncated and devolved formula capital funding has been decimated.

“It has been cut by a factor of ten so there is not a lot of financial support to deal with this problem.”

The seminar also heard the growth in academies in England and Wales could make it harder for health and safety reps to protect teachers and pupils.

Some reps told of their difficulty of getting into academy schools, particularly as they did not have to recognise the Union, while one highlighted a case where an asbestos soffit was left in an open skip in the school park for a number of days.

And disturbingly a science teacher from Kent who taught in the early 1970s reminded delegates of the Nuffield Science Teaching Project, describing how he would cut up small pieces of asbestos sheeting in lessons for experiments with his pupils.

Mr Johnson told health and safety reps that one of the biggest problems for casework was the long latency of asbestos-related diseases, particularly fatal mesothelioma, which can take twenty to thirty years to develop: “It is then difficult to identify which school the individual may have been exposed in,” he said.

Advice to teachers who feared they may have been exposed was to register that with the school and ensure it was put into the school's records, or alternatively insist the same was done by the local authority.

The seminar also received a very professional briefing from members of the North West Region Health and Safety Committee who showed a film they had produced advising members on introducing controlled risks for pupils on outdoor adventurous activities.

Reps also took part in various good practice seminars on classroom risk assessment, sickness absence and the use of harassment legislation to resolve stress casework.

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