Extreme weather is now part of FE’s operating environment. Are we ready?

During this summer’s heatwaves, further education and skills providers across the country found themselves trying to run assessments, practical workshops and exams in buildings, workplaces and training environments never designed for sustained temperatures above 30°C.

For the first time on record, temperatures topped 35°C in May, June and July this year. This spring was the warmest on record for England and Wales, and June was England’s warmest on record too. We are only halfway through summer.

What has been striking is how quickly these conversations have changed. A few years ago, extreme weather planning often sat alongside sustainability discussions as a future concern. Increasingly, providers are dealing with it as an operational reality affecting attendance, staffing, assessment and learner support in real time.

Extreme weather is no longer an occasional disruption. It is becoming part of the operating environment for education and skills.

As Professor Hayley Fowler shared at last year’s National Emergency Briefing: “This is the least extreme weather we’ll experience in our lifetimes”. The question is no longer whether disruption will happen. It’s whether providers have the capacity, capability and support to prepare for it.

Heat, cognition and exam season

The most visible impact is disruption to delivery. Heatwaves land squarely on the FE calendar’s most sensitive point: exam and assessment season. We know that concentration, memory and decision-making all suffer in extreme heat, precisely when learners can least afford it and timetables are hardest to rearrange. This isn’t just theoretical, a major US study of 10m learners found that higher temperatures during exam periods were associated with lower attainment, with outcomes declining as temperatures roles. Practical and vocational provision suffers too: construction, land-based and engineering placements lose delivery days to heat, just as older estates and training facilities, many never designed for sustained high temperatures, struggle to keep classrooms, workshops and workplace learning environments usable. Heat is not the only summer challenge. Wildfires and resulting poor air quality can disrupt operations and create health concerns far beyond the immediate area affected. In some cases, the impacts compound one another: smoke can make it difficult to open windows and cool buildings naturally precisely when temperatures are at their highest.

This isn’t just a problem in the summer

Storms and flooding bring travel disruption, site closures and cancelled placements of their own along with an assumption too rarely questioned: that sending students, apprentices and staff home is automatically the safer, better option. For some it is. For others, home isn’t warm, cool, connected, supervised or safe, and a learning centre, workplace or provider site may be the more stable environment in their week. Whether the disruption is a storm, a flood or a heatwave, assumptions about where people are safest and best supported are not always straightforward. This is especially important for providers serving commuting learners, apprentices travelling to workplaces, learners in rural areas facing and those balancing caring responsibilities around every disruption.

A widening safeguarding responsibility

Extreme weather planning is also quietly becoming a safeguarding issue for students and for staff. Duty of care now needs to stretch to unsafe travel conditions, isolated or vulnerable learners during closures, and the wellbeing of the staff managing all of it, a group too often left out of the conversation. Like so many challenges in education, extreme weather doesn’t affect everyone equally: SEND learners, those already on the margins of engagement, rural learners and those with caring responsibilities.

Extreme weather is not just an environmental problem affecting campuses and training sites; it is a growing threat to attendance, achievement, inclusion and workforce development, which makes climate resilience a core FE and skills leadership issue.

There is also a growing cost question. The expense of adapting buildings and operations can feel significant, but so can the cost of inaction. Every cancelled session, damaged site, disrupted placement or emergency response carries a price tag of its own. For providers already operating under financial pressure, resilience is increasingly becoming an economic issue as well as an educational one.

The same pressure is also the opportunity

The irony is that the same climate pressures disrupting education are also creating demand for new skills. Extreme weather threatens skills delivery at precisely the moment society needs those skills most. Retrofit, heat pump installation, flood defence engineering, landscaping; every industry will increasingly need workers who understand climate risk and adaptation, and the FE and skills sector is the delivery mechanism for that pipeline. The pace of curriculum reform, from T Levels to green apprenticeship standards to local skills improvement plans, needs to keep up with the pace of need.

Nobody needs to start from scratch

The encouraging part is that providers do not have to work this out alone. Organisations like EAUC and initiatives like Climate Ambassadors already offer practical, sector-specific adaptation guidance and support including new climate risk and adaptation information designed to help post-16 education organisations navigate the growing range of available tools and resources. Alongside guidance from partners across the sector, it will include a suggested pathway showing how providers can approach adaptation planning in a structured and manageable way.

There is also transferable learning from outside FE: Arup’s climate resilience compendium, developed for the Mayor of London and aimed at the schools sector, offers a useful model for what good estates and operational adaptation planning can look like. The tools and expertise exist. The challenge isn’t a lack of guidance. It’s turning that guidance into plans that are funded, tested and embedded across the sector.

Where this leaves FE leadership

One advantage is that resilience tends to attract more practical consensus than some other climate-related debates. But it does need to move up the agenda. That means investment in resilient estates, safeguarding policies that treat extreme weather as core business rather than a bolt-on, climate risk considered in capital decisions, and staff wellbeing given equal billing to learner wellbeing.

Our role here is not to tell providers what to do. It is to bring people together, highlight what is already working and make the case that resilience is now a leadership issue, not just an estates issue. Resilience is no longer simply about protecting buildings. It is about protecting learning, opportunity and the skills pipeline on which communities and economies depend. If extreme weather is now part of FE’s operating environment, preparation for it must become part of the post-16 education and skills sector’s core business too.

By Charlotte Bonner, Cheif Exeutive of The Environmental Association for Universities and Colleges (EAUC)