London's schools can't cope with the heat
Plus: Boris Johnson's mystery plan for a second cable car • TfL hackers plead guilty • Brixton Market community bid submitted • It's really, really hot
It’s hot. You’re hot. It’s going to get hotter. There’s a red weather warning. And if the heat didn’t keep you awake all night, then two hours of biblical thunderstorms and lightning probably did.
That is the news.
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London’s schools are supposed to remain open in all temperatures. They’re closing anyway.
When temperatures top 30C, farmers are advised to stop transporting cattle and other livestock as part of their legal duty to protect animal welfare.
As one London headteacher pointed out to London Centric on Monday, there’s no equivalent upper temperature limit on when you should stop putting children in classrooms. Instead, the guidance remains that it is better for young people to attend lessons in extremely hot weather than suffer the academic and social impact of missing out on education.
What we’re seeing in London this week, with temperatures heading towards 40C, is that this approach of compliant muddling through is breaking down. Without clear political leadership on how to respond, headteachers are having to take unilateral decisions on what they think is best for their pupils in the heat.
Dozens of parents contacted London Centric on Monday to say their schools are shutting down entirely for the rest of the week, instituting partial closures after lunch, or offering parents the voluntary opportunity to collect their children early. As more and more schools follow suit, leaving parents unable to work, the impact on London’s life and economy this week will start to spread, with momentum heading towards more closures.
“We just heard our child’s secondary school will close from Tuesday midday to Friday: 2.5 days of lost learning and impact on our ability as parents to work,” said one London parent. “Offices have budget for air con; often schools do not.”
Regardless of the exact solution, many of the capital’s headteachers are conceding that effective teaching will be nearly impossible this week.
“We’re expecting to have loads of kids off,” said one teacher in south London. They said actual academic lessons are being abandoned with staff reduced to “babysitting”.
Comedian Alistair Barrie told us he is voluntarily taking his kids out of school on Tuesday and Wednesday: “Whole school only has two rooms with air con. The headteacher is looking on Amazon Prime for affordable fans. Good job it’s all a hoax.”
One problem for headteachers is that if they send children home then it will impact attendance statistics, a key measure for regulator Ofsted. This can influence the decision to encourage pupils into school, even if it then sees students sent home early.
Attempts to keep standards high and pretend everything is normal also result in strange outcomes. Children at one secondary school in east London were told: “Students must still bring their blazers to school every day. However, they do not have to wear them this week.”
Other London schools are improvising. Shacklewell Primary School in Hackney responded by shifting the entire school day forward, starting at 8am and then shutting down completely by 1pm.
While the British stereotype is of classrooms that are horrendously cold during winter, increasingly the problem in London might be brutally hot teaching environments in summer. Sitting an exam on a 32C day carries around a 10% lower likelihood of passing than on a 22C day, according to a recent report by the Climate Change Committee, suggesting future GCSE and A-level students could be affected by more heatwaves in June.
One London secondary school teacher said “there is no way existing school budget have the ability to absorb the cost of installing air conditioning and other potentially necessary interventions”.
The Department for Education on Monday reiterated that “children are unlikely to be seriously affected by hot conditions”, encouraged school attendance and reissued guidance on dealing with heatstroke.
Official government guidance also recommends turning off mechanical fans in schools when temperatures top 35C on the basis that they can actually cause harm above this temperature.
One parent with a child in a London special school said the headteacher had taken the decision to shut the whole site down completely on Wednesday and Thursday: “I think it’s the right decision as the children are incredibly vulnerable and need a high level of adult support… Also there is a huge risk of children getting ill and having seizures due to the heat which would put extra pressure on the school.”
Yet she doubted that the children would find it cooler to be at home with their parents: “Some are in two bed flats with limited ventilation… [the government] definitely needs to focus on helping keep all children at school in a heatwave.”
This was echoed by the teacher in south London, as they weighed up whether to close: “If we shut then kids will be in even hotter and unsafe flats.”
Parents looking for alternative ways to entertain their children could struggle, with the Young V&A museum in Bethnal Green among the attractions announcing it is closing due to the heat.
Some of the impacts of the heatwave hit harder than others, especially at Weston Park school in Haringey. One message in the London Centric inbox informed us that its sports day had been cancelled due to the weather: “Parents mainly upset because Mr Motivator was going to do the warmup.”
Even office air con isn’t enough to keep the city running
Bosses who struggle to get work-from-home staff back to the office might find desks are unusually full this week, as employees try to take advantage of air conditioning. But some workplaces such as the BBC are suggesting staff in London work from home for fear of the impact of the heat on the journey into the office. Buildings built in the last couple of decades fare no better. Kings Place by King’s Cross, where the air conditioning system has to be shut down whenever it tops 35C, has long tormented the Guardian journalists who work inside it.
Yes, this week’s heat really is unprecedented
“London has never seen three consecutive days above 37C,” said TheSnowWatcher, one of our favourite weather accounts, who suggested the record might not be standing at the end of this week. They added: “The intensity of heat on Wednesday is definitely going to feel worse than 40C in 2022. Back then we had very low relative humidity and more of a breeze.”
What’s making this heat particularly unusual is that this is happening in June, rather than at the traditional height of summer. The previous June high was 35.6C, recorded in Camden in 1957. That record is expected to be smashed multiple times this week, along with the potential for the highest overnight London temperature on record.
Good luck getting any sleep.
“Competitive” community bid for Brixton Market
There was a good debate in the comments beneath our weekend piece on the sale of Brixton Market. We also had some interesting direct correspondence, with one former restaurant owner suggesting the site is now overloaded with food and drink businesses and the market infrastructure needs substantial investment if it’s going to cope. Others pointed out that the site had been struggling financially in the 2000s and it was a previous for-profit landlord that had rebranded part of the site as Brixton Village and turned it into a different type of food destination.
The Advocacy Academy, the south London youth charity spearheading the campaign to take control of the site on behalf of traders, confirmed it met the deadline to submit a bid yesterday to the estate agents handling the sale. The group was hoping to raise pledges of £15m by Monday, towards a headline purchase price of £50m.
A spokesperson for The Advocacy Academy told London Centric that it cannot “provide any further details on the bid itself” but it is “competitive”. They said the traders are “currently going through due diligence with a significant number of major institutional donors” to back their plans for a community purchase.
Manchesterism with Peckham characteristics
In the second most important national news story this week after the hot weather, former Herne Hill resident Andy Burnham arrived in London by train on Monday afternoon to be sworn in as MP. His Avanti West Coast train was more than 20 minutes late into Euston, entitling him to a 25% Delay Repay refund on his ticket. As he was whisked away into the bowels of the capital’s station, news helicopters showed the stalled mess of a rebuild site, which won’t currently even connect to Manchester.
What would Burnham mean for London? Well, the probable future prime minister told London Centric last year that “London needs to be more liveable, for young people particularly” and warned that the government’s focus on growing London’s economy risks “overheating” the city (not literally) and making it an unpleasant place to live for its residents.
He also bemoaned the high rents charged to the capital’s residents by landlords, compared to when he lived in the capital during the 1990s: “It was common that four or five people from my old college would be in Greenwich in a house together. I just don’t think they could do that now, could they?”
Defining Burnham’s “Manchesterism” ideology has been hard. One of the people trying to do it is Miatta Fahnbulleh, the Labour MP for Peckham, who has been advising the likely next prime minister on economic policy and is even being tipped as a potential chancellor. Could a Burnham leadership be a return to his south London roots?
Transport for London hackers plead guilty at the last minute
Two individuals have admitted carrying out a cyberattack on Transport for London that saw around 10 million people’s data stolen, cost £39m, and caused widespread chaos to the capital’s transport system in late 2024.
London Centric spent Monday watching in a very hot Woolwich Crown Court as Thalha Jubair, 20, from east London, and Owen Flowers, 18, from Walsall, West Midlands, took responsibility for the 2024 hack that disrupted TfL services for three months.
The pair had been charged with conspiring to commit unauthorised acts against TfL under the Computer Misuse Act, with a trial expected to last between four and six weeks.
Instead, the prosecution accepted a last minute guilty plea on the basis they had been reckless as to whether damage was caused by the hack and had not intended to cause damage.
The National Crime Agency previously said it believed the attack had been carried out by hackers from the cyber-criminal group, Scattered Spider.
In a development that can only now be reported following his guilty plea, Jubair has separately been charged by the US Justice Department with extracting more than $115m (£87m) in ransom payments following a spate of cyberattacks on 47 separate American organisations.
Flowers, who wore a blue sweater and grey tracksuit bottoms, also pleaded guilty to two separate attacks on American health care companies, SSM Health Care and Sutter Health.
Jubair, who wore a grey suit and striped tie, had pleaded not guilty at an early hearing in November after refusing to provide login details for his devices. That plea remains unchanged, with the prosecution indicating that the charge would lie on file.
London Centric previously reported that despite the fact that TfL’s operational systems remained largely unaffected by the cyberattack, one senior executive told us that behind the scenes it was “an utter shitshow.”
The duo will be sentenced on 15 July.
Can you solve the mystery of where Boris Johnson wanted a second cable car?
Boris Johnson wanted to build a second cable car in his time as mayor (reports Ross Lydall, former City Hall editor at the Evening Standard).
Johnson opened the capital’s first cable car across the Thames – linking the Royal Docks and the O2 arena in North Greenwich – shortly before the start of the 2012 Olympics. The £44m project had to be heavily subsidised by its first sponsor, Emirates, and has remained little more than a tourist attraction.
This apparently did nothing to dampen Mr Johnson’s enthusiasm for a second “dangleway”, according to the TfL commissioner at the time, Peter Hendy.
Lord Hendy last week recalled receiving an unexpected late-night call from the then mayor when both had been out (separately) one evening.
“I was walking home after having a few glasses of wine in a restaurant near my flat in Pimlico, and suddenly the phone rings, and it was Boris wobbling about on his bike,” Lord Hendy said. “He had also had a few glasses of wine.
“He said: ‘Why don’t we build another cable car?’ [I thought:] ‘Oh shit.’ I said to him: ‘How about we not do that? Why don’t we do the next thing in the transport strategy?
“He said: ‘What’s that?’ I said: ‘It’s Crossrail 2.’ He said: ‘Yeah, that’s a good idea!’
“The point of that story was that I knew what the next best thing to do was. We had worked it out. We had a strategy which said, if you want London to grow, this is the best thing to do.”
Lord Hendy is now the rail minister. (He recently told a transport select committee that he read a London Centric story in the morning “over my toast”, which is the only way to do it.)
Hendy was speaking at a Campaign for Better Transport conference on Friday and said he could not recall exactly where Mr Johnson had wanted to build the second cable car.
But he said another legacy of his time working for Mr Johnson was that he always answered his mobile when it comes up as “unknown number”.
Two years ago, this paid huge dividends. “I was sitting in my study at home,” Lord Hendy said. “The phone rang. It said: ‘Unknown number’.
“Now, I always answer unknown numbers on my mobile phone because, when I worked for Boris, he didn’t know how to put the number into the phone. It always came up as ‘unknown number’. And it was either him or an insurance salesman.
“The caller said: ‘This is the Number 10 switchboard and the Prime Minister would like to speak to you. Would you take the call?’ [I thought:] Yeah, OK…
“I got Keir Starmer on the phone. He said: ‘Would you like to be the rail minister?’ And I thought: ‘Well, I would.’ I didn’t tell Sue [Lady Hendy] until afterwards, but she was very understanding.”
PS It’s hard to beat this Reddit thread of lightning pictures from the early hours of Monday morning, so we won’t try to compete.