Retrofit schools and consider moving exams to beat extreme heat, says teaching union leader — SkimNews
Get the Energy newsletter
Daily energy & climate — solar, EVs, oil, the policy fights and tech bets shaping the transition. Free.
- Daniel Kebede, general secretary of the National Education Union, called for a mass school retrofitting programme ahead of next summer's El Niño-charged temperatures, saying UK schools were built "for a different climate".
- Kebede proposed shifting the school year — earlier starts, earlier finishes, longer summer breaks or moving exams from the hottest months — as part of a "really serious discussion" about education continuity in a warming climate.
- At least 760,000 schoolchildren in England and Wales missed lessons during this summer's June heatwave — one in five UK pupils — amounting to more than 15 million hours of lost lesson time.
- Classroom temperatures topped 40C during the heatwaves, with staff describing conditions in which "there was no learning, just surviving," as hundreds of thousands of pupils were sent home.
- Kebede warned the disruption is hitting deprived urban communities hardest, creating a "two-tier system" where children return to flats unsuited to extreme heat and parents unable to work from home, while better-resourced schools cope.
- Kebede compared the level of teacher panic to the Covid pandemic, saying members contacted him in distress over what they saw as a "real risk and danger" to themselves and pupils.
Why it matters: Kebede is reframing extreme heat as a structural underinvestment problem, not a weather event: 15 million lost lesson hours and 760,000 children sent home make the case that Victorian-era and 1960s/70s school buildings are unfit for purpose. His inequality warning — that affluent schools can adapt while deprived urban pupils cannot — puts pressure on the government to fund capital retrofitting before next summer.
Ask SkimNews
