PCC Fire Safety Update Oct 2017

There has been some press interest from the Sunday Post in the last few days around the fire safety of PFI schools. The ex-chair of the Oxgangs PCC, Crerar Christie, was heavily involved in understanding the detail of the Cole Report around the whole wall collapse & PFI issues. As such, it was prudent to seek his comments & inputs on the nature of the questions from the press. His comments are as below. If any parents have any further concerns, either from the below, or subsequent to this, please do get in contact so we can look to get any further information.

“I’m grateful to the parent council for letting me post the following on a Parent Council site (I am no longer PC Chair).

Over the last couple of days the Sunday Post has been contacting parents to seek opinion on the level of concern parents have with the fire safety around the school.  I’m guessing, but this story is likely inspired from a finding of the Cole report into Edinburgh School’s closures, and maybe even the tragedy at Grenfell.

In February this year, Prof. Cole noted “it is surprising that ESP had not take a more proactive approach at an earlier stage to establish the condition of fire-stopping in the PPP1 schools”.  By earlier, he means when the school was built.

Fire-stopping can take on many forms but essentially involves incorporating a fire-proof barrier to prevent fire-spread between floors and along the inside of cavity walls. Engineers design buildings assuming any fire would be in a specific place, and fire-stops are there to contain the fire within that space for between 30 mins and 1 hour, to provide time to evacuate the building.  Prof. Cole went on to find that ESP and Amey could have found these breaches earlier, but failed to do so.

As it happens, one of the reasons engineers think the fire spread so quickly at Grenfell tower was due to a failure of the external fire-stops between floors.  Not sure if the Sunday Post will try to add a sensational twist by linking the stories by the fire-stop issues, but they are unrelated – both in terms of the type of building type and the type of fire-stop.

I spoke – and I’m sure other parents may have also spoken, or been asked to speak – to the Sunday Post reporter, Connor Andrew. He asked me if parents were concerned.  I said I thought once a wall falls of the side of your kid’s school you were bound to have some concerns, but, emphasised that the fire-stop issue was old news and that we have been assured all remedial works have been carried out at Oxgangs and that the building is now safe.  He asked how happy I was sending my kids to the building.  After a bit of thought, I indicated that I was 90% – 95% confident of the buildings safety (which I am).

I went on to say that I thought the Cole report was a good examination of the issues, but that an outstanding issue of Oxgangs’ parents had not been satisfactorily addressed, i.e., that our children were returned to, what was subsequently shown to be, an unsafe building without any proper initial post-failure safety assessment.  I went on to describe how the ramifications of the wall failure affected parents at the time – that we were naturally angry and concerned, that it caused great upset, and that it had also affected parent’s work and child care arrangements.  Also, that it had adversely affected the clubs that that use the school outside of school hours.

What I wasn’t asked about, and what I regret not adding, is how, once we realised where the problems lay, it actually brought parents and teachers together and how it’s spurned us on to try and establish a greater sense of community amongst parents.

There should be nothing new here.  What is curious is the timing of the Sunday Post’s article – the Cole report is now many months old, the issues with the fire-stops in all schools were well documented and were rectified as part of the building repairs last year. To the best of my knowledge, they have also been examined by an external fire-safety expert.  Again, I pointed all of this out to Mr Andrew.  What may be the case, and what may be his angle, is that not all Scottish authorities have been as pro-active in checking their PFI estates, or perhaps that repairs to all Edinburgh PPP1 schools have not been finalised.

Though I’m no longer PC Chair (I pointed this out to him as well), it haunts me that I was never able to get for parents an acknowledgement from ESP that our kids were sent back too soon on the basis of an inadequate survey, nor from either Prof. Cole or the Council that there should be emergency planning protocols which mandate thorough surveys of public buildings (esp. PFI buildings) after, at least, a partial collapse of the building.  My concern now is that, in my eagerness to highlight this, my comments will be somehow sensationalised or taken out of context – so I thought it important and right to forewarn you such an article may come out and give you some background.

Crerar Christie”