Devon MP demands cooling for classrooms after Honiton pupils are sent home in the June heat

Devon MP demands cooling for classrooms after Honiton pupils are sent home in the June heat

Government action on cooling hospital wards should be extended to classrooms that closed in the June heat, a Devon MP has told the Health Secretary.

Richard Foord – the MP for the Honiton & Sidmouth constituency - put the case to Yvette Cooper in the Commons on Wednesday 9 September. He named Littletown Primary Academy in Honiton, which shut for two days in June because the building had become too hot for the children to be in safely, and Ottery St Mary Primary School, which is fundraising for air conditioning.

The exchange followed the Government's announcement the same day of more than £1.5 billion for the NHS estate, of which more than £32 million is for cooling, ventilation and overheating resilience. 

Over the summer, Mr Foord received letters from seven Littletown pupils about the closure. The school, on Honiton Bottom Road, teaches 436 children from the age of three.

Mr Foord, used an adjournment debate in January to argue that a high needs pupil in Devon receives less than half the funding that of a high needs pupil in Westminster. Speaking after his latest intervention on Wednesday 9 September, he said:

"Seven children sat down in the summer and wrote to me about a school that had turned into a greenhouse. They did not write to me about the weather. They wrote about the two days’ schooling that they had lost, and about concern for the heat that they experienced at school.

"I welcome the £32 million going into cooling hospital buildings, because nobody should be treated on a ward that overheats. What I cannot explain to those seven children is why there is no equivalent consideration in the Department for Education for some school buildings.

"The Department for Education should set aside a cooling and ventilation allocation for the school estate on the same basis as the health one, and should extend the overheating standard that governs new school buildings to the school buildings that we already have."

The Department for Education’s Condition Improvement Fund, the route by which academies such as Littletown bid for building work, awarded £450 million this year across 813 projects. That was only one in three of those applied for.

June 2026 was the warmest June on record in England. A red heat health alert covered the South West on 24 and 25 June, with temperatures in Devon of 33 degrees Celsius.

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