Schools across England and Wales shut down on June 23, 2026, as the Met Office issued rare red extreme heat warnings, with temperatures forecast to reach 40°C in parts of both countries. If confirmed, this would break the June temperature record, according to Reuters.

Red heat warnings are the Met Office's highest alert tier — they signal a threat serious enough to endanger lives. The agency has issued them only a handful of times. The most notable was July 2022, when temperatures reached 40°C for the first time in recorded UK history. Reaching that threshold in June would be different: it would mean extreme heat arriving a full month earlier than it ever has before, shifting what counts as the "season" for dangerous heat in Britain.

Across the Channel, France moved faster and with clearer authority. The government ordered 845 schools to close as temperatures hovered around 40°C, according to AP News. France has a formal system: when the national weather agency (Météo-France) reaches a certain alert level, local prefects — regional officials — trigger school closures automatically. Britain has no equivalent rule.

That difference mattered on June 23. The Department for Education told schools in London that they were not being ordered to close, even as schools were already closing on their own, TES reports. Instead, each headteacher and local authority made its own choice. This is how Britain normally handles school operations — decisions stay local and flexible. But when you need everyone to act at the same time, that flexibility becomes a problem. You get inconsistency precisely when consistency would help most.

The heat itself came from North Africa and the Iberian Peninsula, pushed northward by weather patterns that climate scientists have been tracking more carefully in recent years. Scientists now know that extreme heatwaves of this scale are made far more likely by human-caused climate warming, though detailed analysis of this specific event takes weeks.

For headteachers facing the decision on June 23, the situation was clear enough. Most school buildings in England and Wales — many from the Victorian era or post-World War II — have no air conditioning. They can reach dangerously high temperatures inside within hours of the school day starting. Health and Safety guidance doesn't set a legal maximum temperature, but the 2022 heatwave showed what actually works in a classroom: not much when there's no cooling at all. Headteachers who closed schools were filling the gap that the Department for Education's vague guidance had left open.

The broader context here is structural. Britain's reliance on individual school leaders to make these calls during emergencies is starting to look inadequate. After the 2022 heatwave, parliament asked questions and committees examined building standards and cooling requirements. No statutory changes followed. A second severe heatwave within four years — and this one in June, not July — will likely strengthen calls for new rules: minimum standards for thermal comfort in schools and a clear national trigger for coordinated closures.

France's approach is not perfect; centralised orders create coordination headaches for parents and can sometimes be issued too cautiously. But when French authorities released that figure of 845 closed schools, it represented one decision, made through one chain of accountability. In Britain, with some 20,000 individual school leaders each making their own call against unclear national guidance, accountability becomes much harder to trace.