Schools should consider changing start and finish times, reordering holidays and moving exams away from the summer months to adapt to the UK's increasingly severe heatwaves, according to the leader of the country's biggest education union.

Daniel Kebede, general secretary of the National Education Union (NEU), said this summer's repeated bouts of extreme heat had a devastating impact on teachers and pupils, as classroom temperatures topped 40C and hundreds of thousands of young people were sent home.

Call for mass retrofit

Speaking to the Guardian, Kebede called on the government to roll out a mass retrofitting programme to ensure schools, which he said had been built "for a different climate", were better equipped to deal with extreme heat ahead of next summer's temperatures, which he said would be charged by the El Niño weather pattern.

He said it was time for a national conversation about other measures that could help schools adapt to the reality of a rapidly warming climate.

"There needs to be a really serious discussion about how we make sure there is the continuity of education in this changed climate," he said. "You might want to consider moving the school year around, or having a longer summer holiday – in hot countries they tend to have a longer summer holiday. You might consider an earlier start and earlier finish … and perhaps we don't want exams to be happening in the hottest part of the year."

Panic among teachers

Kebede said he had been inundated with messages from teachers during this summer's heatwaves urging the union to act. "The last time I felt that level of panic in the profession was during the Covid pandemic," he said. "I was being routinely contacted by members in distress … they felt there was a real risk and danger to themselves and to their pupils."

At least 760,000 schoolchildren in England and Wales missed lessons during the June heatwave, the Guardian reported. Across the summer, closures affected around one in five pupils in the UK and resulted in more than 15 million hours of lost lesson time.

Classrooms described as unbearable

School staff told the Guardian that learning was almost impossible as temperature records were broken, with pupil behaviour and attention deteriorating rapidly.

One primary school teacher said: "Everyone was lying or sitting on the floor with their water bottles, sweating, moaning and feeling tired, [complaining of] headaches and nausea. The adults barely coped and most of the children were calling for their mummies and daddies. There was no learning, just surviving the best we could."

This summer's severe heat was not confined to the UK. Brutal temperatures and devastating wildfires hit countries across Europe. One of the key demands of student protesters who took to the streets in France this week has been action to make classrooms bearable during extreme heat.

Unequal impact

Kebede warned that the impact of these bouts of extreme weather in the UK was falling hardest on more disadvantaged communities. He said children were often being sent home to flats that were unsuited to extreme heat, and to parents and carers who were unable to work from home or take time off.

"It is having a really uneven impact and it's particularly impacting children who live in deprived urban areas … you will have a two-tier system where schools in more affluent areas are able to cope with extreme heat," he said.

Ageing building stock

Kebede said many of the UK's schools were housed in either old Victorian-era buildings or those built in the 1960s and 1970s, and neither style was equipped to cope with the extreme heat that is expected to become a feature of UK summers.

He said a major capital building programme could transform schools, making them "fit for the century we are living in" while also creating unionised apprenticeships and jobs and revitalising local communities.

"We really need plans in place now because [what we experienced this summer] is going to be the norm," Kebede said.

The comments come as debate continues over how the education system should respond to climate change, with the NEU's intervention placing pressure on ministers to consider structural changes to the school calendar and exam timetable alongside investment in building infrastructure.