Labour has launched a tongue-in-cheek attack on the government’s response to the school buildings crisis, comparing the response of the education secretary, Gillian Keegan, to that of the fictional mayor in Jaws. Keegan on Tuesday defended her department’s handling of the problems surrounding crumbling concrete, publishing a Twitter picture with the phrases “Raac update” and “Most schools unaffected”. Labour’s press team hit back, responding with a similarly formatted picture declaring “Jaws update” and “Most beachgoers not eaten by big shark”. Larry Vaughn, the fictional mayor of Amity, was one of the antiheroes of the Jaws film after preventing the closure of the town’s beach following the first shark attack. Boris Johnson however subsequently called him the “real hero” of the film. The tit-for-tat tweets summarise a chaotic period for the government as it has attempted to gain a handle on the emerging crisis.
Ministers wrote to schools late last week, just days before many were due to open for the new term, alerting them to the potential risks of reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete, which was used in many school buildings in the 1950s and 1960s. As schools tried to work out whether they were affected by the alert, Keegan has attacked them for responding too slowly to her department’s inquiries. On Monday, Keegan was caught on a microphone complaining “everyone else has sat on their arse” while she fixes the problem, and on Tuesday she told education leaders who had not responded to a government questionnaire to “get off their backsides”. The government has promised funding for affected schools, but has come under fire for taking it out of the already-stretched budget for the Department for Education. Keegan has also been criticised for her response, which some say has not adequately reflected the scale of the difficulties now faced by teachers and parents. Labour is pushing the prime minister, Rishi Sunak, to give more details on what he was told about the problem when he was chancellor. The party has not said how it would pay to fix the issue. The opposition party meanwhile has continued its reshuffle, giving jobs to six Labour MPs. They include Dan Jarvis, the former soldier and mayor of South Yorkshire, who has been made shadow security minister. Jarvis has often been tipped for high office since he left the army to become a Labour MP in 2011. Other MPs to be given new jobs include Abena Oppong-Asare, who moves from her role as a shadow Treasury minister to become shadow minister for women’s health and mental health, and Seema Malhotra, who moves from a shadow business role to the shadow education team.