With poor ventilation and children packed in, UK's outdated schoolhouses swelter in the heat

LONDON — Like hundreds of other schools across the U.K., the Welsh school where Mark Morris teaches was forced to close its gates during Europe’s latest record-smashing heat wave.

With no air conditioning or fans, and intense sunlight coming in from windows that don’t open very far — some don’t even open at all — Morris said it would have been impossible to conduct his design and technology classes when the mercury hit a record 35.9 degrees Celsius (96.6 Fahrenheit) in Wales.

“Even in a normal summer, the heat on those south-facing windows becomes unbearable,” said Morris, who teaches high school children things like woodworking and food preparation. “If there’s anything that you need to turn the oven on, you can forget about it. There’s no way anybody could carry on.”

More than 1,000 U.K. schools closed for days or sent children home early in late June, when temperature records were toppled across Europe, disrupting learning and impacting the wider economy as working parents scrambled to find childcare.

Experts say the school closures have exposed how unprepared Britain is in coping with what climate scientists call a “new normal” of more intense and regular heat waves, with aging and poorly funded public infrastructure like schools, hospitals and care homes among the worst affected. Air conditioning is uncommon, and the insides of buildings often become suffocatingly hot because of poor ventilation.

The British government’s climate advisers said in a recent report that these buildings were “built for a climate that no longer exists today” — to keep warm in cold winters, not stay cool in prolonged periods of high temperatures.

In schools that stayed open during the June heat wave, children and teachers made do with low-tech solutions like mini handheld fans and water sprayer bottles to stay cool. Salads and popsicles replaced some hot dishes at lunch. Blinds were drawn and some sought refuge by lying in the semi-darkness on the floor, the coolest part of the room. Some even sat with their bare feet in buckets of water.

Still, with 30 bodies typically crammed inside each classroom, lessons could become a health hazard.

“We’ve had members teaching in extremely hot conditions, to the extent that we’ve had reports of members passing out in classrooms while trying to teach,” said Wayne Bates, a health and safety spokesperson with the teachers’ union NASUWT.

Along with other unions, Bates’ group has long called for Britain’s government to introduce a maximum workplace temperature.

No funding to fix schoolhouses ill-equipped to cope with heat

Many school buildings built in the 1950s to ‘70s are now well past their lifespan, Bates said. He added that four out of five schools still contain asbestos in the fabric of their buildings, making retrofitting air conditioners difficult.

Dave Woods, a head teacher at Beaconsfield Primary School in west London, said it’s not just older school buildings that suffer. In fact, he said the newer part of his campus, built barely a decade ago, does much worse in the heat compared to the old schoolhouse built in 1908. The latter feels cooler inside thanks to its high ceilings and thick exterior brick walls, he said.

“You would have thought in 2017, there would have been more thinking ahead because we already knew about changes to climate, changes to global temperatures,” said Woods, who is also vice president of the National Union of Headteachers.

Woods is considering installing air-conditioning in at least part of the campus, but money is tight because U.K. schools have been chronically underfunded for over a decade. Government funding for schools was drastically cut during austerity measures in the 2010s and never recovered, Woods said, and his school now gets just 7,000 pounds ($9,348) a year for repairs.

That doesn’t go far when fitting air conditioning through the school could cost close to 20,000 pounds ($26,700) and other issues like leaking roofs urgently need fixing, Woods said.

“We’re already looking at some longer-term things, like more tree planting to provide shade onto buildings, external screening onto windows or use of solar film to reflect some of the glare,” he said. “But nothing’s going to happen extremely quickly.”

Air conditioning advised as more heat is expected

The Climate Change Committee, an independent official group advising Britain's government, said in a May report that by 2050, at around 2 C of global warming, heat waves could regularly exceed 40 C (104 F) in southern England.

It warned that without adaptation, the average number of days per year that indoor temperatures could hit 35 C in thousands of English schools will increase by 70% compared to the present day, leading to more days of lost learning and lower educational outcomes.

The committee said low-cost, “passive cooling” measures like blinds and shading should be used as a first approach. But in schools, care homes and hospitals most at risk, it said air conditioning should be installed within the next 25 years, ideally with low-carbon systems such as heat pumps that can do both heating and cooling.

That will cost the government, but investment and action are needed now to combat the impact of climate change, said Richard Millar, the committee’s director of adaptation.

“Our key message overall is that the effects being felt now, when we think about heat particularly, this isn’t something that we’ve historically thought about as one of the key hazards from weather or from climate change in the U.K.,” he said. “We increasingly need to think about heat as the evidence of the last few weeks shows us. And this is one of areas where we have a gap in terms of a proper plan for how this is led, particularly about the public services side of it.”

“It’s not just a future problem. Those impacts are here,” Millar added. “And we’re not prepared for today’s weather, let alone tomorrow’s.”