A free campaign
The world is heating up. The rules have not.
Protecting disabled, SEND, neurodivergent and vulnerable pupils and staff from dangerous heat. Five asks, free tools, and a way of doing it that does not cook the planet in the process.
The contradiction
The state warns that heat kills, and then sets no limit on it.
The UK Health Security Agency runs a heat health alert system precisely because high temperatures harm and kill vulnerable people. Alongside that:
There is no legal maximum temperature for a classroom or a workplace.
Schools are advised to stay open, with no temperature at which attendance is treated as unsafe.
There is no routine funding to cool the home of a disabled person.
A family can still face a penalty for non attendance, even when the building is genuinely unsafe for their disabled child.
Made safe, not fined.The ask that matters most to families
Why the numbers do not work
For many of us the safe temperature is lower than any rulebook admits.
Harm to the most vulnerable can begin well below the twenty six degrees the UK Health Security Agency itself uses to define a cool room. Classrooms routinely reach twenty eight to thirty and beyond.
This is not a comfort question. For autistic, ADHD, dysautonomic, respiratory, cardiac and medicated people, heat regulation is a medical matter, and the safe threshold is individual. The Equality Act 2010 already requires reasonable adjustments to be planned in advance rather than scrambled for on the day. In heat, that duty is not currently being met.
It applies to staff as much as to pupils. A room that is unsafe for a disabled child is unsafe for the disabled teaching assistant standing in it, who holds health and safety rights and Equality Act employment rights at the same time. Both go unmet in the same room, on the same afternoon.
The asks
Five things the Government could do.
A safe maximum temperature
For schools and workplaces, and lower for spaces used by disabled and vulnerable people.
A guaranteed cool room
In every school and every key public space, during heat health alerts.
Funded cooling at home
For heat vulnerable disabled people, delivered sustainably and through low carbon means.
Made safe, not fined
Where an individual heat risk assessment shows attendance is unsafe, the absence is authorised and alternative learning or adjusted working is offered, rather than a penalty.
Counting the harm
Heat related illness and absence, collected and published by disability and SEND status. At the moment nobody is counting, so nobody can see the size of it.
Climate just, deliberately
This is not a call for air conditioning everywhere.
Cooling already accounts for roughly four per cent of global emissions. Air conditioning every classroom in the country would heat the world in order to cool a room, and disabled people would pay for that twice.
So the order matters. Shade, ventilation, green roofs and cool shared spaces first. Efficient low carbon cooling where it is a medical necessity. Protecting disabled people and protecting the planet are the same piece of work, and the asks are written so that they stay that way.
The free tools
Every ask comes with something you can pick up and use.
All of it is written for the people who actually have to do this on a Tuesday in July.
Keeping Cool, Staying You™
Three guides, written separately for parents and carers, for teaching staff, and for secondary students in their own words. Free to download and free to share.
The Heat Risk Assessment Tool
An individual heat risk assessment a setting can realistically complete, so that a decision to keep a young person at home is evidenced rather than argued about.
In depth staff training
A fuller session for teams who want to get this right, which counts towards your team's CPD.
Everything in this campaign is free to use, in order to protect disabled and vulnerable people. Take it, share it, put your own setting's name on the risk assessment. That is what it is for. It is not medical advice, not a diagnosis and not a clinical or first aid document.
The thinking underneath
Holding both
This campaign is one position applied to one policy failure. Remove the barriers, because barriers are real. And fund the care for the bodies that will still need it whatever the room is like, because bodies are real too. That is the whole argument, and it is why the asks include both a cool room and a cooling grant.
Joining in
There is an open letter, and there is room for your story.
If you are a union, a disabled people's organisation, a parent carer forum, a clinician or a school, the open letter is ready for co signatories. If you are a family, your story is the evidence nobody is collecting, and I would be glad to hear it.
Nothing about us, without us.
Get the tools.
The guides and the heat risk assessment tool are free. While the download links are being finished, email and they come straight back, no questions asked.