When record-shattering heat gripped Western Europe in late June 2023, pushing temperatures in Wales to an all-time high of 35.9°C (96.6°F), Mark Morris’s secondary school joined hundreds of other educational institutions across the United Kingdom in shutting its doors. For Morris, a design and technology instructor who teaches hands-on skills ranging from woodworking to food preparation, keeping the school open was never a viable option. Most classrooms at his school lack cooling systems such as air conditioning or even portable fans, and large south-facing windows, many of which are jammed partially open or fully sealed, trap overwhelming amounts of solar heat. “Even in a typical cool British summer, that side of the building becomes unbearably hot,” Morris explained. “If I need to turn on an oven for a cooking lesson? That’s completely out of the question – no one could focus or work safely in those conditions.”
By the end of the heatwave, more than 1,000 UK schools had either closed entirely for multiple days or dismissed students early, upending in-person learning and creating ripple effects across the national economy as working parents were forced to scramble for last-minute childcare or take unpaid time off work. Climate experts and education leaders say the mass closures have laid bare a critical gap in the UK’s ability to adapt to what climate scientists have labeled the “new normal”: more intense, more frequent heatwaves driven by global warming.
Aging, chronically underfunded public infrastructure – including schools, hospitals, and adult care facilities – is among the most vulnerable to rising temperatures, experts note. Air conditioning remains extremely rare in British educational settings, and poor building design leaves most indoor spaces trapping heat to dangerous levels. The UK Climate Change Committee (CCC), an independent statutory body that advises the government on climate action, emphasized in a May 2023 report that the nation’s existing public buildings were engineered for a climate that no longer exists: constructed to retain heat through frigid British winters, with no design consideration for prolonged periods of extreme summer heat.
For schools that did stay open during the June heatwave, staff and students relied on makeshift, low-tech coping strategies to beat the heat. Teachers passed out handheld mini fans and water spray bottles, swapped hot lunch menus for cold salads and frozen popsicles, pulled closed every blind to block sunlight, and even encouraged students to lie on the cool floor of classrooms or soak their bare feet in buckets of water. Even these emergency measures were not enough to eliminate health risks, however: with an average of 30 students packed into each small classroom, rising indoor temperatures quickly turned routine lessons into dangerous heat exposure scenarios.
Wayne Bates, health and safety spokesperson for the NASUWT, one of the UK’s largest teachers’ unions, says the union has received dozens of reports of educators falling ill from extreme heat while on the job. “We’ve had members teaching in dangerously hot conditions, to the point that some have actually passed out in their classrooms while trying to lead lessons,” Bates said. Along with other public sector unions, NASUWT has long pushed the UK government to introduce a legal maximum workplace temperature, a standard that currently does not exist in the country.
Many of the UK’s most heat-vulnerable school buildings date back to the mid-20th century, Bates explained, and are well past their intended service life. Compounding the problem, four out of five schools still contain asbestos in their building materials, a toxic substance that makes retrofitting cooling systems complicated, risky, and far more expensive. Surprisingly, it is not just aging school properties that struggle with extreme heat. Dave Woods, head teacher at Beaconsfield Primary School in west London and vice president of the National Union of Headteachers, says the newest wing of his campus – completed in 2013, just a decade ago – actually retains far more heat than the school’s original 1908 building. The older structure, with its high vaulted ceilings and thick exterior brick walls, stays significantly cooler indoors even during heat peaks. “You would think that by 2013, architects and planners would have accounted for rising global temperatures that we already knew were coming,” Woods said.
Woods has explored installing air conditioning for at least the highest-risk parts of his school, but systemic underfunding has made the project unachievable. After a decade of austerity cuts to public education funding in the 2010s that was never reversed, UK schools have been left with chronically tight repair and improvement budgets. Woods’ school receives just £7,000 (roughly $9,350) per year for all campus repairs and upgrades – a sum that barely covers urgent fixes like a leaking roof, let alone a full air conditioning installation that could cost close to £20,000 ($26,700). The school is exploring cheaper long-term fixes, including planting more shade trees around the campus, adding external screening to heat-trapping windows, and installing solar reflective film on glass, but Woods warns none of these solutions can be implemented quickly.
Looking ahead, the CCC warns that extreme heat will only become a bigger threat to UK education. The group’s May 2023 report projects that by 2050, when global average temperatures are expected to rise 2°C above pre-industrial levels, heatwaves exceeding 40°C (104°F) will become regular events in southern England. Without major adaptation work, the report estimates that the number of days per year when indoor school temperatures reach 35°C will jump by 70% compared to current levels, leading to more lost learning days and worse long-term educational outcomes for students.
The CCC recommends that schools prioritize low-cost passive cooling measures like blinds and external shading as a first step, but it also calls for widespread installation of low-carbon air conditioning systems, such as reverse-cycle heat pumps that provide both heating and cooling, in the highest-risk public buildings (including schools, care homes, and hospitals) over the next 25 years. Richard Millar, the CCC’s director of adaptation, says urgent government investment and planning are required now to address this growing threat.
“For a long time, the UK didn’t think of extreme heat as one of the major weather or climate hazards we have to prepare for,” Millar explained. “But the events of the last few weeks make it clear: we need to start treating heat as a critical risk. Right now, we have a major gap in national planning for this, especially when it comes to public services. This isn’t some distant future problem – the impacts are here right now. We aren’t prepared for today’s heat, let alone the higher temperatures coming tomorrow.”