First up, I'm a secondary teacher. Secondly, my adult son is severely disabled and hugely impacted by the current extreme weather. Thirdly, there was no such thing as the blitz mentality of 'keep calm and carry on' - it was pretty much a propaganda invention and a very good one at that.
Yesterday, I logged on to the Met Office's app to see that temperatures and feels like where I live were higher than temperatures and feels like where my family live, but I was under an amber heat alert and they were under a red heat alert. This changed at 9am in the morning, after the schools had opened. So that's my first issue, because it seems as if the heat alerts had followed any sort of logic (i.e. a certain temperature and feels like produces a certain heat alert) we wouldn't have ended up evacuating at lunch time. Heat alerts are put in place by UKHSA.
My second issue is that this was foreseen. We all knew at the weekend that there would be a significant rise in temperatures, most likely record breaking. Why could the UKHSA not have taken a logical approach at this time. For example, if temperature are going to reach 35 degrees, then we will definitely need to operate under a business recovery plan. Instead of doing this, they prevaricated, leaving people unclear, especially local authorities and school academies, who ended up having to make the call according to common sense rather than solid government-led guidance. This isn't good enough. Everyone was literally waiting to be told exactly what the guidance was and it never came through. This led to last minute decisions and disruption for families (in the case of education). What's the point of a huge organisation like the UKHSA if it's not actually able to carry out the function of its role in a timely manner.
Finally, it concerns me that decisions about public health, which should be coordinated by a health agency, are being made locally and piecemeal. This shouldn't be happening. In an 'industry' - such as education - there should be standing risk assessments and identified control measures already in place, and these should be informed by the appropriate public body. It shouldn't be left to individual schools to 'make it up as they go along' in the total absence of proper guidance from the LA - who themselves are at a bit of a loss because they haven't got any guidance either. Instead, we have (understandably) disgruntled parents and carers who suddenly find their lives upended with last minute notifications that they're struggling to respond to.
Come on UKHSA, get your act together.