This summer, once again, saw schools across the country grappling with genuinely dangerous temperatures. Yellow and amber heat-health alerts became a regular feature of the summer term and headteachers found themselves making the same difficult calls they've had to make before: relax the uniform, open the windows before the school day starts, cut PE, send pupils home early.
For most schools, hot weather is an inconvenience to be managed. For special schools and SEND settings, it's something else entirely — a genuine safeguarding issue that current guidance and current budgets aren't built to handle.
Government guidance is clear that children generally regulate their body temperature less effectively than adults and are at greater risk of heat-related illness. For many SEND pupils, that baseline vulnerability is compounded further:
And then there's the one that doesn't make it into most hot-weather guidance at all: routine.
For many SEND children, predictability isn't a preference, it's regulation. A hot-weather day rarely means just "warmer outside." It usually means several changes stacked on top of each other at once: a later or earlier start time, a shortened day, PE cancelled or moved indoors, assemblies scrapped, uniform swapped for PE kit, familiar staff pulled onto water duty or cover. Individually, small. Together, for a child who relies on routine to feel safe, genuinely destabilising — and often the trigger for the very distress behaviours that heat itself was already making more likely.
This is the bit that's easy to miss if you're only thinking about temperature. The heat is the immediate physical risk. The disruption to routine is the second wave.
Sending pupils home early has become a fairly standard response when a building can't be kept safe. It's understandable — and for some families it's manageable. But as a strategy it has an obvious hole in it: most parents can't simply leave work at short notice, and for many SEND families, arranging alternative care isn't a phone call away, it's a whole additional layer of planning most other parents don't have to do. A policy that assumes a parent is on standby to collect isn't sustainable for most families, SEND or not, and it disproportionately falls on the families who already have the least slack in the system.
Two practical questions kept surfacing this summer that deserve more attention than they got:
Does the transport have air conditioning? A huge number of SEND pupils travel to school by dedicated transport, often for considerably longer than a mainstream school run. A minibus without air conditioning, sat in traffic in 30-degree heat, is not a minor discomfort — it's a real risk, and it happens before the school day has even started.
Does the classroom? Many special school buildings are older, single-aspect, or were never designed with cooling in mind. Government guidance leans heavily on ventilation, blinds, and fans — sensible for a typical mainstream classroom, but a lot less effective in a room full of sensory equipment, soft furnishings, and pupils who may not tolerate open windows, draughts, or the noise of extra fans.
This is where it gets uncomfortable, because the honest answer is: nobody has really worked that out yet.
Some of what's needed is genuinely low-cost and about planning, not capital spend:
But some of it is genuinely capital-intensive, and that's where the maths gets difficult. Retrofitting older special school buildings with proper cooling, or ensuring transport fleets meet a basic standard, isn't cheap, and neither is currently ring-fenced in the way that, say, EHCP-related equipment funding sometimes is. Local authority high needs budgets are already stretched thin, capital funding bids are competitive and slow, and "the classroom gets too hot four weeks a year" doesn't obviously beat "the roof leaks" or "we need another TA" for limited capital funding.
Realistically, progress here is likely to need a mix of approaches: LA capital bids specifically framed around heat and vulnerable pupils, condition improvement funding applications that name climate adaptation rather than treating it as an afterthought, and — increasingly likely, given the pattern of the last few summers — sustained pressure for this to be recognised nationally as a SEND-specific safeguarding issue rather than a general estates one. Charitable and grant funding can plug small gaps, but it was never going to fund a national retrofit programme, and it shouldn't have to.
Until a funding answer exists, the more immediate job is documentation and planning: building heat into SEND risk assessments and provision plans properly, rather than treating it as a one-off "hot weather letter" sent home each June. That's not a fix for the underlying infrastructure problem, but it is something within a school's control today, and it's the kind of evidence base that makes the case for capital funding stronger when it's finally asked for.
The heatwaves aren't going away. The question is whether SEND provision — buildings, transport, and planning — catches up before next summer, or whether we're having this same conversation again in twelve months.
Earwig Academic Reporting helps SEND schools build robust, evidenced provision plans and risk assessments — including the kind of individualised planning that makes cases like this easier to build and easier to fund.