‘We are homeless’ Two years in temporary classrooms in Cumbria

A tinsel glistens through the window of the darkened classroom. But the decorations are not from this Christmas, or last. A whiteboard marks the date when pupils and staff were evacuated from Sacred Heart Catholic primary school nearly two years ago.

- Josh Halliday North of England editor

It was 16 January 2023 when a routine inspection found the floor of the 95-year-old school building was rotten and could collapse any moment. Children would have plunged into the cellar below.

“He said: ‘Get out now. There’s a danger to life,” recalls Simone Beach, headteacher of the school in Barrow-in-Furness, Cumbria, which serves some of the most deprived pupils in the UK, in sight of the high-security BAE Systems docks where multibillion-pound nuclear submarines are made.

The evacuation was supposed to be only short-term, but two years on the children have not returned. Pupils may not be back in class until 2029, because the building has been condemned as unsafe.

Each weekday at 8am, about 200 young children meet outside their old school, braving Cumbria’s freezing winters and regular rain as they pile on to three coaches for the two-mile journey to St Bernard’s Catholic high school, where they are temporarily housed.

A journey that should take 15 minutes takes much longer as staff corral dozens of little bodies on and off vehicles, up a steep driveway and into school. It is 9.30am by the time they sit down in class. The children, says Beach, are wired, tired and “often not ready to learn”.

Each pupil loses about 10 hours of teaching time a week, says the headteacher – 130 hours in a typical primary school term. And it shows in their results. Last summer, fewer than half of pupils (46%) met the expected standard for reading, writing and maths at the end of key stage 2. That compares with about 60% in the local authority and in England overall. This summer, that had plummeted to 18%.

Teachers say this year’s results were affected by having a higher number of children with special educational needs. But it is also, they say, an undeniable consequence of the upheaval.