What a debate about schools and heat reveals about climate, resilience, safeguarding and adaptation. Coffee & Geography ‘Espresso’ co-host Alistair Hamill and I take a look through a geographical lens.
This week, a very public debate unfolded around schools and extreme heat.
Should schools stay open during a heatwave? Should pupils be sent home? Are closures an overreaction? Are we making children less resilient? Didn’t people just “get on with it” in 1976?
At first it all seems to be a debate about temperature. But when viewed through a geographical lens, it becomes a debate about risk, memory and evidence, vulnerability and exposure, and about what resilience actually means. It also becomes about various aspects of key geographical concepts – place, scale, time, amongst others – whether our school buildings, routines and expectations are keeping pace with the climate children are now growing up in.
In a special episode of Coffee & Geography, Alistair and I reflected on a Teachers Talk Radio discussion I had taken part in earlier in the week. The original debate included a range of voices – headteachers, teachers and commentators – but I was left a little frustrated as the discussion bounced a lot into one side being “right” and the other “wrong”, while I was expecting and hoping for a more nuanced discussion on adaptation and child well-being.
There were valid points made across the discussion. Schools do provide crucial safeguarding. Home is not automatically safer for every child. Closures disrupt families and work. Teachers and leaders are operating in buildings that often were not designed for today’s climate, let alone tomorrow’s.
However, there were plenty of assumptions that needed unpacking. And that is where geography is so useful and gives us tools to move beyond the soundbite.
1976 Was Different
One of the strongest themes in the original debate was the repeated comparison to the UK summer of 1976. Many people remember that summer as a kind of national benchmark for heat: children outside, dry grass, hosepipes, standpipes, long sunny days. It really has become part of the UK’s weather mythology.
Unusual events make for powerful memories. And memories and personal experience do matter. Anecdote can tell us a great deal about how events are lived and remembered, but anecdote is not the same as evidence.
As Alistair said in our discussion, 1976 is remembered precisely because it was unusual. It was an extraordinary weather event in the climate of the time. But that is not the same as saying it is equivalent to heatwaves now. This is where the distinction between weather and climate becomes vital.
1976 was an extreme weather event. What we are now seeing is a shift in the wider climatic baseline. The warmest UK summers on record are clustered overwhelmingly in recent decades. The global background conditions are different. The maps of temperature anomalies tell a different story.
In 1976, north-west Europe was a hotspot in an otherwise mixed global temperature pattern. In recent years, the global map is far more widely red. The whole atmosphere-ocean system is warmer. And that matters because a 1976-style event happening today would not simply be “1976 again”. It would occur in a warmer world, with higher baseline temperatures and more energy in the climate system.
So when people say, “We got through 1976,” the geographical response is 1976 was not the same climate. That does not mean the memory is false, but it does mean the comparison is incomplete. Also the 1976 heatwave was lengthy and dry, not just hot. Whereas the heatwave of June 2026 was sharp but very humid. This is a really important distinction because high-humidity heat (high ‘wet-bulb’ temperatures) are far more dangerous than dry heat. These kinds of conditions make it harder for the human body’s natural cooling system to work. When air is very hot and humid, sweat evaporates less effectively from the skin, making it harder to cool down. At sufficiently high heat and humidity, this can become dangerous very quickly, increasing the risk of heat exhaustion and heatstroke.
Anecdote Is Not Risk Assessment
One of the lines I used in the Teachers Talk Radio discussion was:
“Anecdote is not risk assessment.”
So much of the public conversation around heatwaves is filtered through personal memory. I’ve heard TV presenters and commentators, radio hosts, interviewers and interviewees use or pander to soundbites such as “I was fine.”; “We coped.”; “We played outside.”; “We didn’t have air conditioning.”; “We just got on with it.” and so forth.
But risk is not assessed by asking who remembers being fine. Risk is assessed by looking at hazard, exposure and vulnerability.
A heatwave is the hazard. A pupil sitting in a top-floor classroom at 35–39°C is exposed. A child with asthma, sensory needs, medication that affects thermoregulation, poor sleep, dehydration, poverty, poor housing, or limited self-advocacy may be more vulnerable.
Geographers often frame risk as a relationship between:
Risk = Hazard × Vulnerability × Exposure
So the heat itself is only one part of the equation. Two children can experience the same heatwave, but not the same risk. One child may go home to a cool house, a parent present, fans, water, shade and quiet. Another may go home to a top-floor flat, poor ventilation, no adult available, or an unsafe home environment made worse by heat-related stress. One school may have shaded grounds, cross-ventilation, cool rooms and flexible routines. Another may have sealed windows, glass-heavy classrooms, no shade and overheating corridors.
The temperature may be the same but the risk is not. That is why anecdote is not enough.
“We Coped Then” Is Not a Safeguarding Standard
The second line I used that seemed to resonate was:
“”We coped then” is not a safeguarding standard.”
There are many things people “coped with” in the past that we would not accept as safe now. Alistair gave a brilliant example in our discussion: being driven around as a child in the boot of an estate car before modern seatbelt expectations. Many people did that. Many were fine. But that does not make it a good safety standard. The fact that some people survived a risk does not make the risk acceptable. That is survivor bias.
In education, safeguarding is not based on nostalgia. It is based on foreseeable harm, professional judgement and proportionate measures to reduce risk. So when a red heat-health alert states that there is risk even to healthy people, school leaders cannot simply respond with “children need to toughen up” or “we did this in 1976”.
That is not safeguarding. That is memory standing in for analysis.
And to be clear, this is not about accusing school leaders of not caring. In fact, one of the most striking things in the original debate was that the headteachers involved clearly did care deeply about their pupils. They were making difficult decisions in real time, in difficult buildings, with competing pressures and limited resources.
But that care needs the right frame. If the frame narrowly focuses on “children need resilience”, then the response may become endurance. If the frame is “children need safeguarding in a changing climate”, then the response becomes adaptation.
Resilience Is Not the Same as Endurance
This is where the debate became especially interesting. Several contributors talked about resilience. And in one sense, they were right, children do need resilience.
But what do we mean by resilience? Too often, resilience is used to mean “put up with it”. To ‘suck it up’ or ‘push through’. It’s presented as an attitude to take using stoic statements like ‘the real world is hard’ or ‘life is uncomfortable sometimes’. And comparisons to others made like ‘farmers have to work in heat’ or ‘other people have to go to work’.
But that is not a very rich understanding of resilience. In geography, climate resilience is not passive endurance. It is the capacity of people, places and systems to anticipate, adapt, respond and recover. And so resilience is not pretending the hazard is not there, but instead it involves changing routines when conditions change; reducing exposure; protecting the most vulnerable; using evidence to inform decisions; adapting buildings and grounds; and giving young people agency in shaping safer futures.
An ice cream van, water fights, shaded activities or trays of water for children’s feet may be lovely short-term adaptations. They can turn a potentially frightening or miserable day into something more positive – and those are important, but they are not a long-term adaptation strategy. They are coping mechanisms. So given that heatwaves such as these are getting more frequent and intense, the question should be how do we move from coping to planning?
Schools Should Stay Open Where Safe — But That Is Not the Same as Business as Usual
A crucial point, which I felt had to be clarified in the original discussion, is that I was not arguing for blanket school closures. I never said schools should simply close because it is hot. That is a false binary. The real question is not should schools be open or closed? The better question is what does safe, meaningful, adapted provision look like under these conditions?
For many children, school is the safest place. Schools provide supervision; food; safeguarding oversight; structure; trusted adults; water; and, in some cases, a cooler or safer environment than home. But for some children, being sent home may increase risk.
So yes, there are strong safeguarding reasons to keep schools open where possible. But “open” does not have to mean “normal”. Instead it might mean altered timetables; moving pupils into cooler spaces; suspending uniform expectations; reducing physical activity; cancelling outdoor trips; modifying lessons; increasing hydration breaks; prioritising vulnerable pupils; partial provision; or carefully risk-assessed local decisions.
The issue is not closure versus no closure, but whether schools are supported to make contextual safeguarding decisions. That includes knowing which children are more vulnerable to heat, but also which children cannot safely be at home. And this is yet another demonstration why I have been banging the drum that ‘climate change is a safeguarding issue’ for so long.
The Classroom Is a Place — and Place Matters
One of the most powerful contributions in the Teachers Talk Radio debate came from a headteacher describing top-floor classrooms reaching around 39°C. That takes the conversation away from abstraction, that it’s not just “hot weather”. But hot weather in a particular building, with particular windows, on particular floors, with particular ventilation, with particular pupils, with particular staff trying to manage behaviour, learning and safety.
Geographers care about place because place shapes experience. A heatwave is not experienced evenly, and hence is an example of a climate justice issue. Experiences are filtered through school design; room orientation; tree cover; shade; building materials; local deprivation; transport routes; playground surfaces; ventilation; housing quality; and social vulnerability.
A school built to retain heat in winter may be increasingly unsuitable for extreme summer temperatures. A new building with large south-facing glass and inadequate shading may be just as problematic. This is why climate adaptation cannot sit only in policy documents. It has to reach the material reality of schools. The fabric of the building really does matter.
From Climate Literacy to Safeguarding
A major theme in my own work is that climate literacy is a safeguarding issue.
That does not mean every climate lesson should frighten children or overload them with crisis narratives. Quite the opposite. It means pupils and adults need to understand the risks they are living with in practical, age-appropriate and empowering ways.
Climate literacy in schools is not just knowing about greenhouse gases. It includes understanding why heat-health alerts matter; why some people are more vulnerable than others; why hydration is not a behaviour concession; why shade matters; why tree cover is unevenly distributed; why some homes overheat more than others; why climate impacts are social as well as physical; and why adaptation is part of resilience.
That kind of literacy protects children. It helps staff make better decisions. It helps pupils understand why routines change. It helps governors ask better questions. It helps schools move from reaction to preparation. And it helps avoid what I described as shifting baseline syndrome.
Shifting Baseline Syndrome: The Danger of Normalising the Abnormal
One of the most worrying tendencies in public debate is how quickly we normalise what would once have been treated as exceptional. A very hot week becomes “just summer”. A record-breaking event becomes “the new normal”. A health warning becomes background noise. The threshold for serious concern moves upwards. That is shifting baseline syndrome.
Each generation, or even each few years, adjusts its sense of normal to current conditions. But the human body has limits. Children’s capacity to learn, regulate and safely function in heat is not infinitely adjustable. We cannot simply keep moving the baseline and expecting bodies, buildings and systems to keep up. At some point, adaptation has to become deliberate.
What Would a Climate-Adapted School Look Like?
In the final part of our Coffee & Geography discussion, Alistair and I turned towards the future. What would it actually mean to make schools more climate adapted?
Some measures are operational:
- heat plans;
- flexible timetables;
- clear communication;
- hydration routines;
- staff training;
- risk assessment;
- identifying vulnerable pupils;
- and avoiding unnecessary exposure during peak heat.
Some are physical:
- external shading;
- reflective surfaces;
- ventilation improvements;
- better blinds;
- cooler rooms;
- solar-powered cooling where appropriate;
- fewer heat-trapping design choices;
- and buildings designed for future climate conditions.
Some are nature-based:
- more tree canopy;
- shaded play areas;
- green walls;
- habitat mapping;
- school grounds designed for biodiversity and cooling;
- less grey space;
- and pupils involved in mapping, monitoring and improving their own environments.
And some are cultural:
- understanding adaptation as resilience;
- seeing climate action plans as live safeguarding documents, not paperwork;
- involving governors, site teams and senior leaders;
- not leaving sustainability to one enthusiastic teacher;
- and giving young people genuine agency.
As Alistair put it so powerfully, young people need to feel that they can act at a scale that is:
small enough to be manageable, but big enough to be meaningful.
That is where hope lives. Not in pretending everything is fine. Not in pushing children through unsafe conditions. But in giving them knowledge, agency and safer places to learn.
The Real Question
So perhaps the real question is not should schools close in heatwaves? But instead are our schools, systems and assumptions ready for the climate we now have? Because if we reduce the debate to teachers wanting a day off; children lacking resilience; parents being inconvenienced; or nostalgic comparisons with 1976; then we miss the deeper issue.
Extreme heat is no longer rare enough to treat as a one-off disruption. It is part of the landscape schools are increasingly operating within. And that means safeguarding, infrastructure, curriculum, leadership and climate adaptation now belong in the same conversation.
The aim is not to close schools. The aim is to make schools safer, more adaptive and more resilient, in the richer geographical sense of that word.
Because “we coped then” is not a safeguarding standard. And anecdote is not risk assessment.
I would strongly encourage listeners and readers to watch or listen to the full Teachers Talk Radio discussion. The short clips circulating on social media capture only fragments of what was a much wider, more nuanced conversation, with thoughtful contributions from everyone involved.
Alistair and I hope that this Coffee & Geography discussion is an invitation to keep the discussion going with evidence, care, and a properly geographical understanding of risk.
Geogramblings 
fantastically detailed and helpful analysis.
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