'School children are writing to me saying their classrooms were too hot and they were missing school'
A Devon MP says schools need to be better prepared for extreme weather
Last updated 29th Sep 2026
A Devon MP is calling on the Government to extend 'cooling hospital wards' to classrooms.
Richard Foord - the MP for the Honiton and Sidmouth constituency - says Littletown Primary Academy in Honiton was shut for two days in June because the building had become too hot for the children to be in safely - and Ottery St Mary Primary School is now fundraising for air conditioning.
The lib Dem MP put the case to Yvette Cooper in the Commons in an exchange which followed the Government's announcement of more than £1.5 billion for the NHS estate, of which more than £32 million is for cooling, ventilation and overheating resilience.
Over the summer, Mr Foord received letters from seven Littletown pupils about the closure. The school, on Honiton Bottom Road, teaches 436 children from the age of three.
Mr Foord, used an adjournment debate in January to argue that a high needs pupil in Devon receives less than half the funding that of a high needs pupil in Westminster. Speaking after his latest intervention on Wednesday 9 September, he said: "Seven children sat down in the summer and wrote to me about a school that had turned into a greenhouse.
"They did not write to me about the weather. They wrote about the two days’ schooling that they had lost, and about concern for the heat that they experienced at school.
"I welcome the £32 million going into cooling hospital buildings, because nobody should be treated on a ward that overheats. What I cannot explain to those seven children is why there is no equivalent consideration in the Department for Education for some school buildings.
"The Department for Education should set aside a cooling and ventilation allocation for the school estate on the same basis as the health one, and should extend the overheating standard that governs new school buildings to the school buildings that we already have."
June 2026 was the warmest June on record in England. A red heat health alert covered the South West on 24 and 25 June, with temperatures in Devon of 33 degrees Celsius.
The Department for Education’s Condition Improvement Fund, the route by which academies such as Littletown bid for building work, awarded £450 million this year across 813 projects. That was only one in three of those applied for.
What has the Government said?
A Department for Education spokesperson said: "Schools did a fantastic job keeping children learning safely during this summer's heatwave. Where schools remained open, 9 in 10 pupils attended as normal, with teachers pulling out all the stops to keep classrooms cool.
"We design new school buildings to stay cool through effective ventilation and shading and we are investing almost £20 billion to rebuild over 750 schools through our School Rebuilding Programme.
"To support existing school buildings, we're also investing £710 million in our Renewal and Retrofit Programme through to 2029-30 and almost £3 billion a year by 2034-35 in capital maintenance.”