PUPILS escaped being crushed by a collapsing nine-tonne school wall through a combination of "timing and luck", the expert behind a damning report into building failures at Scottish campuses has said.

Industry expert Professor John Cole said had the wall at Oxgangs Primary School in Edinburgh fallen one hour later “one does not require much imagination to think of what the consequences might have been".

An inquiry was launched into building standards for schools built under Public Private Partnerships (PPP) after nine-tonnes of masonry fell during stormy weather in January 2016.

The Herald:

Professor Cole was selected to chair the probe into 17 schools - in Edinburgh and elsewhere in Scotland - that were built under the controversial public-private finance scheme.

It was found the Oxgangs wall collapse was one of five “avoidable incidents” in schools around Scotland.

Mr Cole said in his 250-page report that the schools were badly built and poorly inspected. The responsibility for building and checking the schools in the £360 million project lay with the private consortium Edinburgh Schools Partnership (ESP) and the council.

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The main contractor was Miller Construction, which was acquired by Galliford Try in 2014, took part in the inquiry along with 65 other industry consultants and sub contractors, parents and teachers.

Galliford Try said the bricklayer would have known the fault and it was his responsibility to report it to the main contractor.

However the bricklayer who built the Oxgangs wall did not respond to requests for evidence and "several leading bricklayers all expressed a reluctance to give evidence on current practice".

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Concerns were also raised over obtaining records between the critical build years of 2000 and 2005.

The building problems stemmed from wall and header ties used to hold exterior and interior walls together and attach them to the rest of the building.

Mr Cole said: “The fact that no fatalities to children resulted from the collapse of the gable wall at Oxgangs School was a matter of timing and luck. “Approximately nine tonnes of masonry fell on an area where children could easily have been standing or passing through. “One does not require much imagination to think of what the consequences might have been if it had happened an hour or so later."

He continued: "The inquiry has become aware that this was one of five avoidable incidents of external masonry panels failing in strong winds at Scottish schools in the last few years.

“Five may seem a relatively modest number but, given the potential implications of failures of this type, one such collapse is too many. “The reason that the incidents are described as avoidable is that in all cases it would appear that proper quality control at the time of building could have identified and have rectified the basic defects in construction that led to failures.

“As will be seen in this report, in addition to the 17 schools in Edinburgh, evidence has been provided on the discovery at a number of other schools in Scotland of panels or block work, located at high levels in school buildings, that were not securely fixed.

“Similar construction defects to those discovered in the Edinburgh schools were also found at these schools."

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Fire safety concerns have also been raised and Edinburgh City Council is currently responding, saying that "issues raised in the report regarding 'fire stopping' in the 17 schools are being rectified and the council has employed a fire safety expert to ensure all buildings remain safe for occupancy".

In Edinburgh, every public building is being checked and Andrew Kerr, the city council's chief executive, said the findings had implications for similarly built buildings across Scotland and the UK, particularly in buildings such as schools and hospitals.

The Herald:

Key findings from the report include that the collapse of the wall was due to "poor construction and inadequate supervision", insufficient independent quality assurance and poor record keeping by the council and ESP and ineffective quality assurance measures within the construction industry.

Mr Cole praised Edinburgh City Council's move to close all 17 PPP schools and ferry 8,300 pupils in 70 coaches to 61 schools and nurseries during the crisis.

Two South Lanarkshire Council schools, Trinity High in Rutherglen and Duncanrig in East Kilbride, each had external walls collapse during high winds in January 2012, during Christmas holidays. At Trinity, a wall collapsed onto the playground and at Duncanrig, a brick panel on a gable wall collapsed inwards against the internal leaf of the cavity wall. They were built in 2009 under a PPP contract.

“Fortuitously both schools were closed" at the time, Prof Cole said. A wall collapsed onto a roof at non-PPP Lourdes Primary in Glasgow in January 2012, and again no one was injured, but lack of restraints identified.

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Balfron High in Stirling was partially closed after structural problems identified, and the report found concerns defects were identified in three out of four PPP schools in Greenock, one out of four non PPP schools surveyed in 2016 in the same town, and also in Angus – where concerns were raised at five out of six PPP schools – and three out of eight in Dundee found to have deficiencies, while two in East Renfrewshire - St Ninian's High School and Mearns Primary School - needing remedial work in 2011.

The Chief Officer of Galliford Try, the company that acquired Miller Construction, said in his evidence to the inquiry in relation to the construction of the wall said: “There is a reverse hierarchy of responsibility in regard to the way the wall had been built, and in my view the bricklayer who built the wall will have known that the wall had not been correctly built and that it had knowingly been left in the unsafe condition due to the embedment issues caused by the cavity variations.”

The report contains a raft of recommendations for the council and other bodies, both public and private, as well as the construction industry, ranging from building methods, training and recruitment and quality control.

Edinburgh is now to draw up an action plan specific to address all recommendations individually.

Among sanctions placed on ESP was the withholding of monthly payments in excess of £1m. Mr Kerr said: “The report pulls no punches and makes clear what went wrong, the reasons for it and where responsibility lay.

"Clearly there are lessons for the council and I will now be drawing up an action plan to take our recommendations forward to ensure everyone can have confidence in the safety of all of our buildings.

“The council, our public and private sector partners both in Scotland and across the United Kingdom, need to take on board the issues raised and address the concerns highlighted in the report as they have far-reaching implications for the construction industry.”

A spokesperson for Edinburgh Schools Partnership said: "We have fully cooperated with the council and Professor Cole in trying to establish the facts of what happened with the schools affected.

"Having only just received a copy of the report, we will now take time to consider its findings in detail before commenting further.”