Should schools be closed at 35°C?

[DancingThroughLife02]

Not really an AIBU but looking ahead at the forecast for next week and it’s looking like a scorcher.

I work in a secondary school in a science classroom (which seems to get extra hot during practicals) and we have no fans or AC or anything at all to keep the children cool. Open windows don’t seem to help much. The thermostat in the classroom got above 30°C in the afternoon.

The children need to have their water bottles filled at break times and lunch times only and are not allowed to fill them during lessons - which I disagree with as so many come to me saying that they didn’t get a chance to fill theirs up in the 20 minute lunch break.

Last week I had children saying they were dizzy and feeling sick, and they’re made to go outside during breaks. I’m also not sure that anything I taught them during the extra hot days actually stuck in anyway as they all seemed melted onto the desks.

I know there is a legal lower temperature limit for classrooms/workplaces but maybe with the increasing summer temperatures over the last few years we need to start considering investing in ACs as the heat in summer seems to be more prolonged than a couple hot days and in the meantime consider health and safety of the students (and teachers as even I was beginning to feel a bit dizzy).

I don’t believe any any school has a 20 minute lunch break

What you believe is irrelevant. The fact is plenty of schools have a rolling hour spread across tranches of year groups - resulting in each one having roughly 20 minutes to get in to the dinner hall, queue for lunch, choose lunch, eat lunch, go to the toilet and then they have to leave the building for the next tranche to be able to enter. Because hardly any schools have dinner halls big enough for 1200-1400 pupils at any one time, any more.

nobody had a water bottle
No, we had functioning taps, paper cups and water fountains though.

everyone survived
Well, they didn't. There were many excess deaths in 1976. No reason to believe some of them weren't maybe teachers or other school staff.
Although there weren't as many excess deaths from the heat in 1976 as there were last year, in 2025....

We had hot weather in the 70s & 80s...
Always wild to know that some people live and die by the belief that there should be no advances, whatsoever, in rights, conditions and outcomes over a period of forty to fifty years later. Mental.

Yes even in the boiling hot summer of 1990 I don’t think temperatures went up quite that high in most places. Then there was the heatwave of 92, again not as high. Regardless, the kids welfare has to come first and going forward we need to start thinking about Air Con. Many high street shops have it now, I think schools should follow suit.

All schools should have air conditioning put in, particulary new build schools which are the worst. I have a new build house. They are built to keep in the heat due to energy efficiency regulations. They become unbearable in very hot weather, particulary the upstairs rooms.

I don’t see why you object to everyone getting the day off because of the heat?

You think that air-conditioned supermarkets should close because of the heat?

Do we need a day of remembrance for you lot? 😁 “The sun beat down hard in the trenches of ‘76…” 🎖️🪖
I hear what you’re saying and I agree with you - there’s much to be said for resilience, and thank goodness that was clearly demonstrated by my parents who also survived ‘76 or I wouldn’t have been born not long after! But there’s also something called “not suffering more than we need to” and I’m here for that too 😎☀️
PS: What would Scarlett do? After all, tomorrow is another day…!

The thing about the summer of '76 was that it was exceptional. So exceptional that people who lived through it are still banging on about it 50 years later.

The temperatures experienced that year are becoming the norm. But we don't have the right buildings or infrastructure to deal with it.

And also, '76 doesn't prove that climate change isn't happening.

It isn’t illegal. A 20 minute break after six hours is the requirement.

Yes this is the issue - we need a better protocol in general for crazy weather at either extreme.

I lived in Hong Kong, not even schools there have aircon and aircon is everywhere there. They have open corridors, but the outdoor assemblies are brutal. Several children would faint every time, the perfects were on stand-by the catch them!

And, despite what some like to say, a good number of schools either cosed or adapted their hours.

How nice. I'm just wondering the relevance of the question given what I actually said.

As it happens, I do quite a lot of of work around education, including trying to raise awareness and action on education support and funding, outside of my paid job and other volunteer work I do.

But that's in no way relevant to the statement I made.

I went to school in a hot country. We didn’t have air con but our school hours were different - we essentially started at 730am and finished at 2pm. I do recall fans in classrooms and the buildings weren’t built like greenhouses like so many seem to be here!

The parks near here are a bit shit, but the tower blocks recently got an upgrade and the local ones now have better gardens with lots of trees but some of the modern blocks of flats are worse as they have no gardens, nor local trees, nor local shady parks.

We have gardens with trees. (Benefits some flats but not all. )

Air-conditioned shops a plenty though locally and further afield. I'm off to the supermarket with lots of trees on the edge of the car park.

The whole country needs to adapt tbh, and get rid of some of the rigid thinking around work and display a bit of ingenuity and common sense.

I'm another who grew up in a hot country. When it was unusually hot - the sort of heat you weren't acclimatised to just by living it - you'd adapt as much as you could. For instance, utilities would change working hours to start earlier and finish earlier, or run a split shift - so that only true emergencies were being dealt with in the hottest part of the day. In farming, we'd be out at first light and back indoors by 10, then out again at around 3.

It's nigh on impossible for primaries where the world of work and the world of school are so closely entwined. But a lot of the economy could shift working hours and take advantage of the UK's long summer days to stretch out when work (and commuting) actually gets done.

And we need to get rid of the madness where we're subsidising electrified heating but not combined heating and cooling systems, and building regs that only focus on only keeping heat it rather than simple and affordable solutions such as shutters.

While the outside temp will be the same, a lot of homes are a lot easier to ventilate and to keep cool. I keep my back door and all the windows open all day and evening in hot weather, so the house gets a cooling breeze, and I keep the front curtains closed until the sun has moved round at approx 1pm and is no longer shining directly on the front of the building.

At night, I only close the big windows on the ground floor so there's still a breeze. (I'm lucky enough to live in a very low crime area, I realise that this wouldn't be safe everywhere).

These options aren't available to schools, and they tend to be built with massive great windows so there's a lot more solar gain. It's astonishing to read that some schools don't have blinds to keep the sun out, and even more astonishing that children can't get a drink of water when they need one. My old school was built in the mid-60s, when summers were nowhere near as hot, and it had drinking water points all over the place. And we had blinds in every room.

Now that average temperatures are on the rise, schools/LEAs really need to look at measures to mitigate high summer temperatures.

Fab, thanks!

I don’t have an illness thanks 😂 I have just evolved to survive in very cold dark climates and absorb the necessary amount of vitamin D required to live in Shetland in January and February.

Of course plenty of people evolve to cope in a climate outside of their natural one but what I’m saying is it’s not the same for every body at all. My Portuguese partner was utterly surprised that it’s not just a case of me wearing a higher SPF, we experience a completely different physiological response to the heat.

In the last school I worked in - it was no problem. The building opened in the late 2010s and was fully equipped with air con. Frankly, I’d rather be there than home.

The school I work in now is an old 1960s building. No air con. Very little ventilation. My classroom doesn’t even have blinds for half the windows (floor to ceiling), so it’s like a conservatory. Due to PAT testing regulations I can’t bring in a fan from home. The school doesn’t have fans at all.

I’m in surgical menopause and on an SSRI. It’s too bloody hot.

Even if the kids are okay (spoiler alert: they aren’t)… the teachers are not!

I'm glad that my classroom has an aircon.

Not going to show me the mutual respect of answering my question in return?

You know, if you accidentally quoted my post instead of the the one where your question would actually have made some sense, it's ok to admit it.

This is really weird 😂

Yes but they are used to these temperatures , we aren't and our environments aren't equipped for it, i doubt that many get ac and blinds.
Adults in the work place usually just get on with it but for kids in uniform in a hot and sunny classroom it's pretty shit.
I doubt whether much learning takes place when lots of kids are going to feel thoroughly miserable.
It's been a long time since i left school but i can still remember being there during extreme hot and cold weather.

Lots of 'new build ' schools of the last 20 years were designed with massive windows and atrium spaces. Absolutely bonkers. Add into that massive class sizes and barred windows that you can't physically open more than an inch. Uniform that is nylony and uncomfortable just exacerbates the feeling of being slowly roasted. Poor kids.

I went to school in the tropics.

Massive open windows (covered in mesh to stop bugs), huge ceiling fans, big verandas that shaded the windows, school day from 7 am - 12:30 pm. Lots of shady areas at break time, no lunch break as we had that at home.

It's not comparable to how our school buildings are built.

My classroom has blinds which don't really block the heat (and are not on all the windows) and none of us have fans! Almost no shade in the playground...

You know children are vulnerable and very susceptible to heat exhaustion which can literally kill them. And your husband's apprentice will be under strict employment legislation as they are under 18 so he may well need to take the day off, if it's as unbearable as you describe, as if he gets ill due to lack of health and safety precautions then the employer may be liable.