Union Leader Wants Exams Moved Out of the Hottest Months
“Perhaps we don’t want exams to be happening in the hottest part of the year,” the general secretary of the National Education Union has said, calling for a serious discussion about moving the school year or lengthening the summer holiday. Classroom temperatures passed 40C in June and at least 760,000 pupils missed lessons.
Daniel Kebede puts the scale of the disruption at more than fifteen million lost lesson hours during that heatwave alone, and describes the response from members in terms he has used only once before: “The last time I felt that level of panic in the profession was during the Covid pandemic. I was being routinely contacted by members in distress.” His argument is not really about weather but about building stock. Most English schools are Victorian or date from the 1960s and 1970s, built, as he puts it, for a different climate, and he wants a mass retrofitting programme before next summer — which forecasters expect to be hotter still, with the strongest El Niño in living memory peaking at the end of this year. The inequality point is the one that will decide whether this becomes policy: without retrofitting, he warns, “you will have a two-tier system where schools in more affluent areas are able to cope with extreme heat”. A school with air conditioning sits exams in June; a school without one sends pupils home. Moving the exam season would be among the largest changes to the English school year in decades, and no minister has endorsed it. This is one union leader’s proposal, reported by one newspaper, and should be read as the opening of an argument rather than the end of one.