With record-breaking temperatures in the UK this week, many are finding their office is the coolest place to be. But not for schoolchildren: hundreds of schools across the south of England and Wales are closing or varying their hours, causing chaos for some parents.
“My daughter’s primary school has announced it’s closing for the week,” says one mother, in London. “Everyone is scrabbling for last minute childcare or having to have their kids at home while they work. The irony is that the children won’t be much cooler at home as most people don’t have AC either! I work for myself and have had to put work on pause for three days to look after my child, essentially hiding in the one cool-ish room in the house with a fan on. We have some home learning for the children to work through but I fear there will be a lot of TV.”
She lives in “a fairly affluent part of a large London borough” but says schools are not prepared for our increasingly hot summers. “Only one public area of the school has AC and one other classroom. The rest of the school relies on fans… I can’t see this changing though as our cash-strapped councils surely don’t have the hundreds of thousands needed to install Ac in each school. The government needs to acknowledge that these temp spikes aren’t a blip, they’re now a pattern, and equip schools with the tools and infrastructure to stay open.”
As the UK experiences increasingly extreme weather, temperatures in schools have become a major concern. Modelling commissioned by the Department for Education and carried out by researchers at University College London and the Met Office suggests some English schools already experience one or two days a year when indoor temperatures reach 35°C, making learning “very difficult”. Without adaptation, that could rise to an average of 7.8 days a year under a 4°C warming scenario. More broadly, the researchers estimate that higher average temperatures – not just extreme heatwaves – could cost pupils up to 12 days of learning a year.
Last month, a landmark report by government advisors said air conditioning should be installed in all schools within 25 years. The report by the Climate Change Committee on adapting to the impacts of global heating said schools should consider the impact of heat on pupils taking exams, not only related to classroom temperature but also to pupils’ ability to sleep at night when temperatures remain above 20°C.
Government guidance for teachers and school leaders, published last year, warns them to look out for the symptoms of “heat stress” in children – including discomfort, irritability and signs of dehydration. This week, parents are reporting schools closing, or offering reduced hours. Sports days, trips and after school clubs have been cancelled, and children are being hosed down in the playgrounds at lunch.
the heat inside Daniel’s school became unbearable. “It was during that heatwave a few years back,” he recalls, “that it got so bad, we had to close the school for two days.”
Daniel, a deputy head at an inner-city state secondary school, says when London hit 40°C in 2022, they had to close for two days. They have managed to stay open this week, but he says his staff dread the summer months. “It’s not just when it gets extremely hot – we have problems with the building when it reaches the high 20s outside,” he explains, “which you can reasonably expect to happen over quite a few weeks of the school year.”
Along one side of a particular corridor, he says, the classrooms become unusable in warm weather and children are reallocated to other rooms where possible. “We obviously allow the students to take off blazers, give them more water breaks – which is disruptive to learning. But it’s kind of putting a plaster on a big wound,” Daniel admits. “During the hottest days, teachers can barely teach, let alone students learn.
“My staff say it’s really hard to function properly, and the kids all have their heads on the desk. It’s hard to get anything out of them.
“You’re essentially losing days, sometimes even weeks of learning for these children.”
Glassy, modern schools that are sweltering in hot weather
The school building Daniel teaches in is less than 15 years old. It was part of England’s Building Schools for the Future scheme – a huge capital investment programme introduced by former prime minister Sir Tony Blair in 2004 to rebuild or refurbish every state secondary school in England. The scheme relied on PFI (Private Finance Initiative) contracts, in which private firms funded the initial building work, with the public sector repaying the cost over decades – typically 25 to 30 years – along with interest, maintenance fees and profit.
But like many modern buildings, the school is ill-equipped to cope with increasingly extreme weather. Extensive glazing lets in lots of natural light, but Daniel says the building struggles to maintain a comfortable temperature year-round.
“Students complain a lot when it’s hot,” he says. “But when it’s really cold, the building doesn’t heat brilliantly either. There are lessons every year where I tell students they can keep their coats on because it’s so cold. It’s just not very good at keeping a level temperature throughout the year.”
Both old schools and modern new-build schools in Britain are proving poorly equipped to cope with climate change (Photo: Johnny Greig/Getty)The PFI contract, Daniel argues, has left the school with almost no scope to fix the issues with overheating. He brought in experts, who recommended installing external shutters to block direct sunlight and keep temperatures down in the summer. A cheaper alternative was solar-control film on the windows to reflect heat before it penetrated the building. “But the question was, who’s going to pay for it?” he says. The school budget could not absorb tens of thousands – potentially more – in remedial works. The private company that owns the building weren’t willing to foot the bill, nor were the local authority, which owns the land.
The consequences of overheating can spill over into every aspect of school life, including what children wear. In a recent Mumsnet poll, 96 per cent of users agreed that schools should relax uniform policies during hot weather. While many parents said their schools already did so – some even allowing pupils to wear PE kits on particularly hot days – others described what they saw as unnecessarily rigid rules.
“When it got to 40°C, my daughter’s school still insisted the girls had to wear tights, no socks allowed,” wrote one parent. ‘It was insane.’
Others described children feeling faint or struggling to cope in the heat while at school.
For Daniel, all of this points to a wider problem. He says he’s spoken to teachers at several new-build schools locked into similar PFI contracts and facing the same overheating problems. “We’ve known about global warming for a long time – it’s not as if it’s a shock that temperatures are getting higher,” he notes. “The fact that it wasn’t considered well enough in the design of the building – plus schools are locked into these contracts where no one will take responsibility – means we’re stuck with a building that isn’t fit for purpose all year round.”
Cancelled sports days and the rise of ‘hot play’
Tim Fulford, a teacher and NEU health and safety representative, says he regularly hears from schools across the country where classrooms become virtually unusable in hot weather. “Many schools don’t have any ventilation systems other than opening and closing windows,” he states, “and in some of the newer PFI schools you can’t even do that.”
It’s not just newer schools struggling. Older buildings can overheat too, if they’re not designed with temperature in mind. Pimlico School (now Pimlico Academy), the celebrated modernist school built in the 1970s, became notorious for summer temperatures so extreme that its glass-heavy design was likened to a greenhouse. The building was ultimately demolished and rebuilt in the late 2000s, with overheating among the practical failings that had dogged it for decades. Victorian schools, meanwhile, can also suffer from severe “solar gain” – short-wave radiation from the sun that heats a building – through large sash windows.
Schools are already having to adapt – in winter, there is “wet play”; now, during heatwaves, primary schools are resorting to “hot play”, where children are kept indoors because it’s simply too hot to go outside. Some education experts have even questioned whether the school calendar remains fit for purpose in a warming climate. Research cited by the Climate Change Committee (CCC) found that taking a test on a 32°C day reduces a pupil’s chance of passing by around 10 per cent compared with a 22°C day – prompting calls to consider whether major exams should continue to be held during the hottest part of the academic year.
Hotter weather also brings a greater risk of poor air quality – an issue Nathalie Pearson, Founder and Director of Safe Air Schools UK, campaigns on. She says schools can face a difficult trade-off: keeping windows shut to limit heat gain may reduce ventilation, allowing CO2 levels to rise, while opening them can bring in outdoor pollution – especially near busy roads, she says. “Research shows that all of this has quite an impact on children’s health and learning.”
The World Wildlife Fund, in partnership with fellow charity Learning Through Landscapes, has been supporting schools to rethink their playgrounds, arguing that children need safe access to outdoor space for wellbeing, play and connection with nature.
The schools of the future – shady and ultra insulated
The new Harris Academy school in Sutton, south London was designed with overheating in mind, using measures such as careful facade design, solar shading and ventilation systems (Architype)The charities point to research showing that playgrounds dominated by artificial surfaces such as tarmac, rubber crumb and astroturf can become significantly hotter than natural surfaces like grass, soil and sand. (Astroturf can also release harmful chemicals into the air as it heats up.)
Together, they are now calling for an overhaul of what they describe as outdated school regulations, arguing that while schools must provide some outdoor space, there is no requirement for that space to be climate resilient. “There’s no mention of climate, nature, play, sport, learning, community use in the regulations,” observes Matt Robinson, CEO of Learning through Landscapes, “and these things are really important.”
“By putting in nature-friendly spaces, we immediately create climate shelters,” he continues, “which generate cooling breezes and reduce temperatures – not just outdoors, but inside buildings too through shade. It’s more immediate, cheaper and more accessible to implement.”
Increasing numbers of schools are now being built with extreme weather – including hotter summers – in mind.
Sioned Holland, Architect and Passivhaus Designer at architecture firm Architype, specialises in so-called “passive houses” – a building standard developed in Germany in the 1990s. Passivhaus buildings, Holland tells me, are designed to slash energy use while maintaining comfortable indoor temperatures and good air quality through ultra-insulation, airtight construction and mechanical ventilation systems that provide fresh air without relying on opening windows. Architype has designed several Passivhaus schools across the UK, including Harris Academy Sutton and the recently completed Mulberry Academy London Docks. Both were designed with overheating in mind, using measures such as careful facade design, solar shading and ventilation strategies to maintain comfortable temperatures throughout the year.
When designing schools, Holland says her team considers everything from building orientation and existing tree cover to keeping high-occupancy spaces such as classrooms away from east- and west-facing facades, where solar gain is harder to control.
They also limit glazing, which can trap heat in the summer and leak it in the winter.
Holland advises on retrofitting existing buildings, too, so she is familiar with the frustrations schools face. “So much money gets pumped into these new builds and then they can’t even serve these basic functions,” she sighs. “I don’t think we are doing enough about it.”
But she insists that overheating is avoidable – if it’s considered from the outset. “We’ve been building passive schools in this country since 2012 on fairly basic school budgets,” Holland claims. “It doesn’t need to cost an arm and a leg.”
The key, she explains, is to build for the future. “You need to make sure you’re not only testing against today’s climate, but also the climate we’re likely to have in 2050 – otherwise we’ll just keep making the same mistakes.”
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