'Crumbling' Greater Manchester school forced to shut multiple times over 'flooding' and 'potentially explosive sewage gas', BBC's Panorama claims

A "crumbling" primary school in Greater Manchester has been forced to shut multiple times over "flooding" and "potentially explosive sewage gas", it is claimed.

Teachers at Russell Scott Primary School in Denton have to empty out buckets of water collected from leaks whenever it rains, according to the BBC.

Headteacher Steve Marsland told BBC Panorama that it was just one of a number of issues the school, in Clare Street, has been battling for almost a decade.

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In 2015, the school underwent a multi-million pound refurbishment to its 150-year-old building. But Carillion, the company contracted to carry out the repairs, left the school with a catalogue of new problems, including faulty fire doors.

Carillion has since gone bankrupt, with debts of more than a billion pounds, and the school has been left battling issues old and new, including flooding, roofs leaking and heating failures for nearly a decade.

"Since 2015, we've had to close the building six or seven times for various issues," said Mr Marsland. "We've actually abandoned the building for explosive levels of sewer gas."

In 2022, Mr Marsland said he received a letter from the Secretary of State for Education, saying that the school would be rebuilt, but he has been waiting since then for news of when the work will start.

The Department for Education (DfE) has said the school will have "a detailed programme plan to review" by the end of January 2024 and will be more" deeply engaged" by the department from that point onwards, according to Panorama.

"You get used to every problem and you deal with it, and deal with it, and deal with it. So it becomes second nature and just normalised, which is the