Schools must retrofit and reschedule to survive UK heatwaves, union warns

This summer, when classroom temperatures climbed past 40 degrees Celsius, British schools did not simply grow uncomfortable—they stopped functioning. Hundreds of thousands of pupils were sent home. At least 760,000 schoolchildren in England and Wales missed lessons during the June heatwave alone, losing more than 15 million hours of instruction in the space of a few months. One in five young people across the UK experienced school closures within those months. The heat was not a minor disruption. It was a rupture.

Daniel Kebede, general secretary of the National Education Union—the country's largest teaching union—has begun to speak plainly about what this means. The panic he received from teachers during the summer reached levels he had not witnessed since the Covid pandemic. Members contacted him in distress, describing what they saw as genuine risk to themselves and their pupils. A primary school teacher told the Guardian what those classrooms actually looked like: everyone lying or sitting on the floor with water bottles, sweating, complaining of headaches and nausea. The children were calling for their parents. There was no learning happening. There was only survival.

Kebede is now calling on the government to treat this as a structural problem, not a weather event. Schools across the UK, he argues, were built for a different climate—many are Victorian-era buildings or structures from the 1960s and 1970s, neither designed to shed or manage extreme heat. He is pushing for a mass retrofitting programme to make these buildings fit for the century ahead. But he is also proposing something more fundamental: a national conversation about rescheduling the school year itself. Moving exams away from the hottest months. Extending summer holidays, as many hot countries do. Starting and finishing the school day earlier. These are not minor tweaks. They are admissions that the old calendar no longer works.

The burden of this crisis, Kebede warns, is not falling evenly. Children in more affluent areas attend schools with better infrastructure, better cooling, better resources. Children in deprived urban areas are being sent home to flats unsuited to extreme heat, to parents and carers who cannot work from home or take time off. The heat is creating a two-tier system before the next summer even arrives. What happened this year, Kebede said plainly, is going to become the norm. The government needs plans in place now.

The problem extends beyond Britain. Across Europe this summer, brutal temperatures and devastating wildfires struck multiple countries. In France, student protesters have taken to the streets demanding action to make classrooms bearable during extreme heat. The crisis is continental. But in the UK, the response so far has been reactive—closures, sent-home pupils, teachers in distress. Kebede is arguing for something different: a capital building programme that retrofits schools, creates unionised apprenticeships and jobs, revitalises local communities, and acknowledges that adaptation is no longer optional. It is survival.