UKC

Our H&S advisor has sent out the following wonderful snippet ( undoubtedly typed in their air-conned office):

“Although there is no legal maximum temperature level when a school has to shut, the DfE suggest 35c is the maximum for students”

I have no idea how they expect that to be workable. It’s got to 33c in my room this week despite using fans, blinds & any other method I can think of, and the kids were either falling asleep (not due to my teaching) or sweating manically along with chronic headaches, as was I before I gave up and took them all out to sit under the trees. 

Surely it’s time to change the law to put a maximum temperature in place, especially for those of us trying to work in creaky old 1960s buildings with no classroom air con & utterly shocking ventilation. 

I feel your pain. My room isn't quite that bad but I had a cover class upstairs yesterday and it was grim. I got some reflective solar film fitted to my windows and it's made a huge difference. Might bring it down  degree or 2 for you.

Have you tried this? There are a few variations but I'm told it works.

youtube.com/watch?v=dGah_lug5NQ&

Whilst i agree, what doyou do with the kids if its too hot to teach? If you send home every school age kid in a heatwave, thats going to cause more of a childcare headache than the occasional localised snowday.

I thought this to be a plea from a new teacher at St Trinian's School for Young Ladies

It does beg the question what would happen in Spain, France, Portugal, Africa where they regularly see this temperature.

Logic would suggest they’d create their buildings in such a way as not to turn classrooms into ovens. 

If the threat of being forced to send kids home existed then the people running schools would be forced to take the problem seriously and take measures to reduce the temperature.

At risk of sounding callous, that’s for the parents to figure out. 

If the classroom is too hot, take your pupils outside and teach them there.

Can’t you just put a wrung out wet towel on each of them?  It’s what I do when desk working in very hot, dry weather.  Or relax the uniform rules and allow them to wear scrappy t-shirts they can soak and wring between classes.

Give them glasses of cold water in class.

Mildly hot temperatures like 30oC -35oC are only really a problem when there’s high humidity as well.

I think people are really falling out of touch with the world.  A hundred years ago there were very few fans, no air conditioning and still jobs to be done.

This is no excuse for using absolutely crap buildings that turn to hot boxes.

I'm ready for the dislikes so here goes:

FFS, Man the f*ck up, princess!

Good one, and many of those schools don't have A?C even though hot temperatures are the norm, particularly in Africa. You often see classes being held outdoors in the shade of a tree.

I remember my boarding school days in the UK. We were never excused lessons because it was "too hot". The only concession was that we were permitted to take off our jackets, and collars and ties, and roll up our sleeves.

They have a siesta.

I taught in the same secondary school for 34 years. Taking kids outside for lessons was not allowed. Of course this didn't apply to PE.

The room I spent most of my teaching life in was too hot or too cold for most of the time. Radiators turned off at the weekend so it was always freezing on a Monday morning in winter. + Metal framed windows which continually sprung open. Radiators which stayed on in summer plus no curtains to keep out the sun. Hell was a badly behaved second year class [are there any other kinds?] on the last period on a hot sunny Friday afternoon. - A bit like being stuck in the bar at the Kingshouse with a stranger describing his exploits along the "Aggy." [I know this from personal experience.]

They are called Y8s now, I reckon they're OK. It's when they hit Y9 (3rd years) you have to watch out, particularly if you teach an options subject that the vast majority are never going to study again. So mix 33 Y9s, an utter indifference to your lesson, 28 degrees outside and worse in, and the knowledge that in 3 more weeks they'll not have to deal with you as a teacher again for maximum current enjoyment! We start watching videos next week I reckon...

It's a fair suggestion but lots of schools won't let teachers take classes outside and a lot of lesson activities don't translate well onto the field anyway.

Perhaps time to bin school uniform and allow normal clothing. The Victorian head masters might turn in their grave, but it's better than folk passing out. 

It can't be hard to give kids open access to water and tell them(parents too) to use sun cream.

Lots of your suggestions are sensible but they're not always as easy as they sound.

How many towels do you think you can find in a school?

Yeah, teenage girls in wet scrappy t-shirts. No issues there.

Even super-simple things like this aren't always as trivial as they sound. The taps in a lot of classrooms aren't safe drinking water (often fed from decrepit tanks on the roof) so most schools are reliant on a small number of very slow drinking fountains. Most schools have rules against refilling water bottles during lessons and even if the rules are relaxed in unusual weather, they're so slow that massive queues build up.

I don't think anybody's suggesting that the temperatures pose a serious danger, more that it's understandably very difficult to get full focus out of fractious, ridiculously overheated teenagers.

There were also very few schools with enormous plate glass windows that the architect thought looked fantastic on his computer model!

I’m going to presume you would claim to be a graduate of ‘School of hard knocks, university of life’?

You want to try working in my game, the blower room I was in today was 40c and I'm doing physical graft in there. Next week I have to go to my worse site, small room with 3 machines and zero ventilation. It's normally 25 to 30c above ambient. I will be getting there at 4am so that I can be clear of site by 1200 before it gets too hot.

The safety department at my biggest customer has decided that high viz gear has to be full sleeve on all sites too so that's going to be fun

No, because that's a crap, tired cliché.

I would suggest, however, that if you can't cope with a few days of warm weather without coming on so overly dramatic, you might want to start looking for a job in the freezer department of Waitrose (other supermarkets are available.)

Oh, and you maybe want to look up chronic. It might not mean what you think it does.

And you want to try having 30 teenagers in a room with no adequate ventilation, temperatures up to 33c and you still have to get them to try to concentrate and learn, especially this close to the end of term. I didn’t choose do this job to suffer in uncomfortable conditions; if I wanted to have crap conditions at work I’d have skipped the 5yrs at uni and just done something menial & manual instead  

Going outside isn’t always an option (I teach DT, so practical lessons need to be in my workshop). Soaking kids in towels or giving them wet t-shirts isn’t viable either for obvious (career destroying) reasons, and they’ve been in PE kit all week anyway and are still roasting.

Maybe if they were sent home more often then parents would kick up an adequate fuss to get schools to pay attention and make learning environments suitable for purpose. 

Wet hair works remarkably well if you’re being all Victorian about damp clothes.  

It sounds perfect to me - a chance for them to learn to work hard in mildly hot weather without complaining about it, a very useful life skill that...

Being a DT teacher could you get the pupils to design a method of keeping themselves cool?

I built an air con unit a few weeks ago from an old cool box, some ice packs, lengths of pipe & 2 old computer fans, which works great in a small area (our technician has pinched it for his prep room). However, it has about as much effect on the classroom as a chronic asthmatic with a mouthful of ice cubes blowing down a straw. 

I'll bet that your headteacher and SLT have found a way to stay cool.

I’m not sure what you mean by ‘all Victorian’, but I do know that you’ve never worked with teenagers. Getting them to wet their hair is either (and most likely) going to be refused as they don’t want to mess their hair styles up, or turn into an absolute ball-ache as they use it for an excuse to mess around.

It's the 21st century in the 6th richest country in the world and schools can't supply their kids with safe drinking water? Is that not a bit embarrassing? 

Perhaps UK schools need to focus their efforts on basic sanitation and not uniforms, inappropriate shoes and haircuts etc. They could always bin the mornings religious assembly, where I presume they unsuccessfully pray for air conditioning, then share the time throughout the day so the pupils can travel to the nearest well or spring for their safe drinking water. 

I'm not one of those 'teaching is the toughest job in the world and if you're not a teacher you can't possibly understand' type teachers and believe me there's lots of them about but...there are a few folks on this thread with strange ideas about how a classroom / school works in the 21st century.

You might just about get teenage girls into wet tshirts, certainly the teenage boys would be supportive of that (parents, child protection staff and the media maybe less so) but wet hair? Some of them would quite literally rather die.

Getting rid of uniforms isn't going to make a better building appear. The problem is nothing to do with what happens in schools and everything to do with how education is funded i.e. not sufficiently.

By the time they've build it it will make an unusual and entirely useless Christmas present.

But wearing shorts, t shirt and sandals or trainers will make the kids more comfortable.

The teachers can follow suit. Wearing a shirt and tie doesn't make someone a better teacher.

True. But if head teachers aren't battling parents over pointless hair cuts, they can chase the issues that really matter. Their time is finite after all. 

Edit. I'm not suggesting schools don't also need more funding. 

Are you seriously blaming the day-to-day protocols of teachers/headteachers rather than the lack of funding, for a situation in which the UK is "the 6th richest country in the world and schools can't supply their kids with safe drinking water"?

(I'm completely with you on religious assemblies!)

I didn't say they didn't also need funding did I? Just that at times their obsession with Victorian culture overides practical thinking. 

But what would prefer to wear when it's either 30c or -10. I bet the clothes revolving around school uniforms don't spring to mind. 

FTFY

Uniform etc is a separate issue from hot classrooms, clearly it's something you feel strongly about but don't conflate the two. Personally I've never seen teachers wasting much time on it like you seem to think they do but then I teach in Scotland where things are often a bit different.

Teachers and even headteachers have little control over the issue raised by the op. The problem is mainly poorly designed and managed buildings. Below are some specific examples I've encountered, some of them might sound like they have a quick fix but when you're dealing with a cash strapped local authority which moves at glacial pace even when they have the cash then it ain't so easy.

Acres of south facing glass with windows which only open about 2cm. Can't afford to replace the windows in part due to asbestos in the walls.

Central heating controlled from an office 20 miles away. Still comes on in hot weather, no control from school.

1950s heating system which is either on full or off. No middle ground. Again, no control in school.

Internal rooms with flat roofs and unopenable perspex skylights.

Rooms in which curtains/blinds need to be closed to see whiteboard/projector screen further limiting ventilation. Dark coloured blinds radiate heat into room.

Tiny rooms with 33 people packed in.

Honestly, you couldn't make it up and uniform really has hee haw to do with it.

We have drinking water.for the children but they are not allowed to refill in lesson times  (the professional judgement has been taken away).

The head has announced students must arrive and walk around in their blazers even in this weather and must ask permission to remove them in class.  

Bonkers.  

I wouldn't disagree with the state of the buildings. But wearing shorts and a t shirt would make a huge difference to pupils comfort. 

A slightly different point from your initial one but I can indeed agree with you that shorts and a t-shirt are better than trousers and a blazer in hot weather.

Good grief man!

Next you'll be suggesting that pupils should be allowed to loosen their ties!

Not on my watch. ; )

Well done you!

Keep an eye on those top buttons and shirt tails as well.

I'm presuming your school is one of the few that didn't get PFI'd?

We're on some sort of waiting list for a new building. Not all of the points above were the same school but most were.

All the schools I've ever worked in have had untrustworthy taps but enough drinking fountains to keep kids well supplied with cool, safe drinking water at lunch and breaktime. The problems come during lessons when the fountains are normally spaced out enough and slow enough (along with kid's natural inclination to dawdle) that letting them fill up during lessons can be quite disruptive. Most heads then ban refilling during lessons. Personally, I've been known to ignore that rule when it gets really hot but it is disruptive.

For the record, although it's technically still a requirement, most non-religious state schools don't bother with religious assemblies.

Really? What a cock'ish thing to say. Not all "menial and manual work" involves working in crap conditions

I prefer one of these for those pesky warmer days. https://bit.ly/2tWZN5P

I let it go at the time but it wasn’t a very nice thing to say.  I’d expect a teacher to understand what “menial” means, and to appreciate that a lot of manual labour is anything but menial.

Don't worry too much. He (she?) doesn't understand what chronic means either.

My room hit 34.8 on Thursday afternoon, having started at 32oC. It was a bit heartless of me to do a heating experiment lesson 5 I suppose, but they do so love a good Bunsen lesson!

I'm thinking that building design is lagging behind the effects of climate change perhaps?

My primary school was/is a creaky old 60's building, and that was very often overly hot during the summer in the large and low ceiling classrooms. 

As are many schools - mine certainly was.
It makes you wonder how teachers and pupils have managed to survive hot summers for the last 50 years or so without melting or exploding, etc.  

To fair, I can't remember having had an intense headache in primary school due to the heat, just feeling like I was wilting rather, and 2 degree below the suggested maximum temperate isn't a large amount. 

Well, yes, the heat makes you uncomfortable and makes you wish you were in a pool of cold water, etc.  Unfortunately, life isn't that easy and sometimes you have to accept that it's a little bit shit and working in uncomfortable working conditions is one of them. 
Don't worry though, give it six months and people will be complaining that it's too cold...

If it's very close to the department for education's suggested maximum, the OP may have a point, no?

Facebook has made me cynical too, about how predictably people respond to what's to be expected each season, I almost wish one could place bets on who is going to complain about what.

I think that pairing the words so neatly was the problem.