The asbestos time bomb in our schools: Institutions are crumbling

Once a year, primary school headteacher Roger Tweed used to take his board of governors on a tour of asbestos hot spots in the buildings where he taught, proudly reassuring them that they were all perfectly safe.

'I realise now that I actually knew sod all about asbestos, except what I'd been told on a health and safety course,' he says. 'That was: 'If it's all sealed and painted over, then don't worry about it – it's safe. But if it looks flaky, for God's sake, get somebody to do something about it'. That was basically my asbestos training.'

Roger, 75, is dying from mesothelioma, a terminal cancer caused by exposure to asbestos fibres. He is unusual, having survived five years since being diagnosed with the disease, which is always fatal. Most victims die within 12 months.

'I didn't realise back then that asbestos can shed microscopic fibres even when it isn't showing massive flaking,' he says. 'And we had pinboards and ceiling tiles that were made of the stuff. We were putting pins in and out of the pinboards all the time, releasing fibres and breathing them in.

'I have come to terms with the fact that I will die, but what really worries me is the pupils. There are many times more pupils than teachers and I fear they will be following me and developing mesothelioma in the next ten to 20 years.

'There is going to be a tsunami of young people who will become ill, leading a life of pain and sadness and dying in agony. But successive governments have simply ignored the problem.'

According to the Joint Union Asbestos Committee (JUAC), which represents eight teaching unions, Roger's fears are well-founded.

An as yet unpublished report shared exclusively with the Mail and entitled What Is The Real Risk From Asbestos In Schools? concludes that at least 1,400 teachers and support staff and 12,600 pupils have already died from mesothelioma since 1980, and that: 'Hundreds of thousands of students and staff, exposed to asbestos in their schools since the mid-1990s, are predicted to die in future from mesothelioma.'

If all of these people died shortly after being exposed to asbestos, their loss would result in a shared sense of national horror – and demands for action. But the latency period between being exposed to the material and developing symptoms can range from 20 to 60 years. Which means most victims die quietly and unnoticed in old age.

Asbestos-related disease is the UK's biggest industrial killer, taking more than 5,000 lives every year, according to the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) – more than three times the number killed in traffic accidents.

More than half of victims die from mesothelioma, a cancer affecting the mesothelium, a membrane surrounding the lungs, heart and intestines. Symptoms include abdominal pain, chest pain, coughing and breathlessness caused by a build-up of fluid on the lungs.

As Roger says, official government policy for decades has been to leave asbestos where it is unless it is damaged and flaking.

But as thousands of schools – many built from the 1950s to the 1990s from lightweight prefabricated materials containing asbestos – are in a dire state of disrepair, it is increasingly difficult to argue that this policy is working.

Add to that the growing concerns over the potential collapse of schools built from controversial Reinforced Autoclaved Aerated Concrete (RAAC), which also contains asbestos, and the enormity of the problem becomes clear.

This is why the Mail is today launching a major campaign Asbestos: Britain's Hidden Killer. First, the Government needs to create a national online database listing every non-domestic building that contains asbestos. And secondly, it must use this register to set up a programme to remove the deadly substance, starting with schools and hospitals.

The UK has the highest mesothelioma rate in the world because of its industrial heritage and post-war building boom. Male and female rates reached 60 and 13 deaths per million respectively in 2020-2022 compared with nearly 27 and 3.5 per million in 1984-1986. In the US, the rate is less than nine per million.

There is no official figure for the number of schools containing asbestos. However, freedom of information requests to the Department for Education (DfE) by researchers and campaigners have established that there are at least 21,500.

There are more than 32,000 schools in the UK, and any built before 1999 – when the use of asbestos was finally banned – are likely to contain it. Among them are 12,000 'system-built' schools, utilising lightweight steel prefabricated designs and occupied decades beyond their planned lifetime.

The HSE's mesothelioma statistics are hopelessly flawed because only deaths below 75 are recorded in job statistics – and 70 per cent of people who die from mesothelioma are aged over 75. Also, the statistics record only a dead person's last profession, so if they had been a teacher and later became something else, only the latter job would be recorded.

What is certain is that teachers and support staff are more vulnerable than the rest of us. Statistical research conducted by Robin Howie, former President of the British Occupational Hygiene Society, found that they are five times more likely to develop mesothelioma than the general population.

Chillingly, a study conducted by the US Environmental Protection Agency in 1980 found that for every teacher who died from mesothelioma, nine students were likely to die in the following decades.

But this figure could be higher because a later inquiry, in 2013, by the Committee on Carcinogenicity, which advises the UK government on cancer, found that children were more vulnerable than adults, and that a child exposed at the age of five was five times more likely to develop mesothelioma than an adult exposed at 30.

Roger taught at eight schools in and around Northampton from the age of 23 to 70, when he was diagnosed. He became breathless – the first of his symptoms – while at his son's wedding in Crete. As guests of honour, he and his wife, Joan, had been given a villa with a view at the top of a hill. But he couldn't make it up there.

'When we got home, Joan had me straight into Daventry hospital where I had a chest X-ray,' he says. 'When my consultant saw the results, she asked whether I had ever worked with asbestos.

'After I'd had a biopsy, I went for the results and the doctor said he wanted to introduce me to my Macmillan nurse.

Joan and I looked at each other and could only laugh, because that was the first hint that it was cancer. We faced it with gallows humour and positivity.'

Sadly, the following year Joan caught Covid in December 2020 and died in hospital two weeks after Christmas.

'When I first got my diagnosis, I couldn't even pronounce mesothelioma,' says Roger. 'I spent a lot of time writing about it on Facebook but nobody took it seriously. What came back was sympathy, but I didn't want sympathy. I wanted people to say that it's bloody infuriating that so many people are dying from this completely avoidable cancer.

'We need to be thinking about the huge cohort that's behind me – the pupils who won't get their symptoms for years.'

Under the Control of Asbestos Regulations 2012, every non-domestic building must have a 'duty holder' responsible for registering where asbestos is located and what state it is in. Roger was the duty holder at each of the schools he ran. 

He said he took his responsibilities very seriously and kept his asbestos registers up to date, but he is concerned that as groups of academy schools have replaced local education authorities (LEAs), there is less of a centralised collation of such information.

'LEAs used to have professional building inspectors, but academies are run by educational professionals like me,' he says. 'Looking back, I didn't really know enough about it.'

Such a wholesale delegation of responsibility for asbestos – some might say abdication of it – has allowed central government to wash its hands of the problem. And while heads such as Roger took the responsibility seriously, other duty holders are not so diligent. 

Freedom of Information requests made by the JUAC in 2021 to the heads of 60 schools known to contain asbestos found that only 37 had up-to-date surveys, and only 17 had established where all the material was located.

Dr Gill Reed, author of the JUAC report, says: 'Our research predicts that the risk is increasing as buildings degrade, and so hundreds of thousands of staff and children in school today will die from mesothelioma in future. Children and young staff are particularly vulnerable.'

Dawn Hamilton, a career primary school teacher working with children with special educational needs in Manchester and Cumbria, died from mesothelioma in 2018 aged just 67. She had been diagnosed two and a half years earlier. 

'She thought she had probably been exposed early in her career while teaching in Moss Side, Manchester, in the 1970s, but she had worked long term in two schools and been a supply teacher in many more, so we don't know exactly where,' says her daughter, Peggy Walker, 41, now a member of a panel with experience of the disease that advises the Mesothelioma UK Research Centre at the University of Sheffield.

'She particularly remembered the Moss Side school as having a cloakroom down some steps, and the ceiling in the cloakroom had pipes with lagging on them. That was unusual and the image of it stuck with her.

'She was a lovely, caring and devoted teacher. She was very artistic and would always be pinning artwork on to boards, some types of which we now know to have contained asbestos. At Christmas she'd be pinning up tinsel and decorations into ceiling tiles, and some of those could have contained it, too.'

Ms Walker was struck that her mother's death certificate recorded that she'd died from an 'industrial disease'. 'An 'industrial disease'? She was a teacher!

'If teachers and pupils were going into school and then getting a cough and being diagnosed with cancer six months later, this would be an absolute national emergency. But because symptoms can come 20 to 60 years down the line, it's not, and it should be.'

I put the JUAC claim of 'hundreds of thousands' of future deaths to the DfE but it did not address it, saying only: 'We take the safety of children and those who work with them incredibly seriously. We expect all local authorities, governing bodies and academy trusts to have robust plans in place to manage asbestos in school buildings effectively, in line with their legal duties, drawing on appropriate professional advice.'

The HSE said it did not recognise the figures in the JUAC report. A spokesman said: 'Asbestos-containing materials (ACMs) were used extensively in the construction of schools and other public buildings from the 1950s until the use of asbestos in Great Britain was completely banned in 1999.

'Where ACMs are in good condition, well protected and unlikely to be damaged or disturbed, they can be left in place. However, they will need to be regularly monitored and reassessed to ensure their condition remains stable.'

It added that its own inspections found that 'the majority of schools were safely managing asbestos'.

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Parents are likely to be concerned that only a 'majority' were found to be safely managing the material.

The enormity of the problem has resulted in successive governments choosing to ignore it.

As far back as 1997, the Medical Research Council reported that 'children attending schools built prior to 1975 are likely to inhale around 3,000,000 respirable asbestos fibres…Exposure to asbestos in school may therefore constitute a significant part of total exposure.'

In 2015, an inquiry by the Parliamentary Group on Occupational Health and Safety described the problem as 'a time bomb'. It reported that: 'When doors were slammed and walls and columns hit in system-built schools, the asbestos fibres ejected into the classrooms were at levels eight hundred times greater than background levels.

'Other tests have shown that removing books from a classroom stationery cupboard with an asbestos insulating board back releases levels one hundred times greater than background levels, as does displaying the children's work with drawing pins or staples.

'In some schools these releases of asbestos fibres have occurred every day over the course of many years so that the cumulative exposures of staff and pupils are considerable. The result is that the occupants of schools are dying from the asbestos-related cancer mesothelioma.'

Two years ago, the Parliamentary Work and Pensions Committee recommended a 40-year programme of phased removal of asbestos from all non-commercial buildings, and the establishment of a national digital register recording all the locations containing asbestos, and its condition. The Government and the HSE rejected both recommendations.

Given that epidemiological experts and the Government's own advisory committee on science say there is no safe lower threshold for asbestos exposure while the risk of such exposure in dilapidated schools is growing, this response seems wholly inadequate.

Some people exposed to large amounts are not affected at all, while some exposed to only a few fibres go on to develop mesothelioma. This means breathing in even tiny amounts of asbestos is something of a lottery.

With so much of it in so many schools, and with ten million pupils in the UK, it's a bit like playing Russian roulette – but with children's lives.