Three ways climate change could impact education - with heat expected to cost children 'days' of class time

• A new Government risk assessment on what climate impacts could mean for schools has been published
• The data says children could miss more than a week of learning each year to the heat in just a few decades
• Many state school buildings and sites already face a big flood risk - especially secondary schools
• Some schools are already being damaged by floodwaters, including over the last winter

Weeks of learning could soon be lost to rising temperatures heating up classrooms, while huge amounts of our state-funded school buildings face a serious risk of flood damage.

Last week, the Department for Education (DfE) published a new research report, analysing the risk that three major climate impacts could have on England’s schools. Without major global action on climate change and efforts to prepare schools, it forecasts extreme heat, flooding, and potentially even water shortages may start to have a growing impact on young people’s education.

Parts of the country have just escaped their first heatwaves of 2025, and the BBC reports we could see another begin as early as this week, with temperatures set to creep back into the high 20s over the coming days. It comes as a brand new study by The Met Office warns that climate trends could make UK heatwaves longer and hotter - while the chance of temperatures exceeding 40 degrees Celsius was “accelerating at pace”.

The DfE is already taking climate action in schools across a few different fronts. But what exactly does the risk assessment say this could mean for our schools, and our children? Here’s what you need to know:

Overheating

Just last week temperatures soared to over 30 degrees Celsius in parts of the UK, reaching heatwave conditions. The UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) even issued an amber-level heat health alert for all of England, meaning that temperatures were likely to impact health and wellbeing.

According to the NHS, children are one of the groups considered more susceptible to the effects of extreme heat, including problems like heat exhaustion or heatstroke. Although there is currently no legal maximum temperature for classrooms, headteachers are able to send children home if they believe the heat is becoming a risk to their safety.

The new risk assessment report says that on very hot days, particularly when indoor classroom temperatures reach 35 degrees Celsius, learning could become very difficult. Currently, schools may already experience one or two days a year like this on average.

But if no global climate action is taken, surface temperatures could rise to approximately four degrees above pre-industrial levels by the turn of the century, it warned. If no special adaptations were made to England’s schools to prepare for this, extreme heat would mean that learning could not reasonably take place in some teaching spaces on as many as eight days a year.

If temperatures rose an average of two degrees above pre-industrial levels by 2050 - now just 25 years away - children would lose about three school days each year to extreme heat. But the Met Office and University College London analysis showed that even more subtle increases in temperature could lead to a decreased ability to learn - setting children back even further.

If schools didn’t adapt and without global climate action, this could mean they lose the equivalent of eight days of learning by 2050, and over 11 days by 2100.

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Flooding

Rising temperatures can also cause more frequent and severe floods, with warmer air able to hold more water - leading to heavier rainfall which can overwhelm drainage systems and burst river banks.

Flooding has already been having an impact on British schools. Earlier this year, 10 classrooms in one Leicestershire primary school were flooded after a nearby brook broke its banks, the BBC reports, with pupils potentially unable to return for the rest of the school year. In November last year, a Herefordshire school was flooded during Storm Bert - just days after pupils returned to class as previous flood damage repairs wrapped up, according to Metro.

The risk assessment says that England has many schools, especially secondary schools, at risk of some kind of flooding. Based on Environment Agency data, 66% of all state primary school buildings in England were either at low, medium or high risk of surface water flooding, while 34% were not considered at risk. About 83% of secondary schools were at some risk of flooding, while just 11% were not.

Alarmingly, 20% of primary school buildings and 38% of secondary school buildings - or about two in five - were considered to be at ‘high risk’ of flooding. This means that there was at least a 1 in 30 chance they would be flooded in any given year.

Water scarcity

The third major issue the risk assessment covered was water shortages in schools, which, “while uncommon, do occur and we know that when individual schools are affected it can be highly disruptive”.

Just last week, the UK’s Environment Agency predicted that England could face a five billion litre a day shortfall in public water supplies by 2055 - the volume of 4.5 Wembley Stadiums. Climate change, population growth, and environmental pressures were all impacting supplies, it added, and we’d also need a further one billion litres a day to generate energy, grow our food, and power emerging technologies.

While the report didn’t include any specific predictions on water scarcity and schools, the DfE said that it was keeping an eye on emerging knowledge in this area, and would update its risk assessments and guidance as new information came to light.

In the meantime, it directed educators and school leaders to its non-statutory emergency planning guidance - an in-depth guide to help schools plan for all sorts of emergency scenarios.

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