Every year, schools in England prepare for new safeguarding updates. Designated safeguarding leads (DSLs) – the staff responsible for safeguarding in schools – spend the summer reading the latest Keeping Children Safe in Education (KCSIE) guidance and turning it into September staff training.
Is the guidance adequate?
KCSIE is not an obscure school document. It is statutory guidance that schools and colleges must follow when safeguarding and promoting children’s welfare. The 2026 version was published on 7 July 2026, ahead of coming into force on 1 September.
There are things in the guidance that are useful. Its continued focus on mental health, information sharing, absence from education, online safety, children at greater risk and whole-school safeguarding gives schools important tools. But as someone who responded to the consultation both as a trans person and as someone who works on climate change as a safeguarding issue, I am left with a familiar concern. KCSIE is still better at responding to risks once they are already politically visible than it is at recognising foreseeable harm. I remain deeply concerned about how the guidance frames some identity-related safeguarding issues for trans and gender-questioning pupils. I wrote about that during the consultation, because safeguarding guidance should protect vulnerable children, not make them more exposed.
This article focuses on another glaring omission. Climate change is still absent. That silence now looks indefensible.
Climate change is in the room with us now
In the same week the new guidance appeared, The Guardian reported teachers describing classrooms above 40°C, with pupils and staff experiencing nausea, fainting, headaches and heatstroke. Some teachers said attention and behaviour deteriorated rapidly, and that learning on the hottest days became “just surviving”. Clearly, this is no longer a future problem. It’s already part of the school day.
Climate change is in the classroom where children sit on the floor with water bottles because the building cannot keep them cool. It is in the playground with little shade and too much tarmac. It is in the decision about whether school is safer than home during a heat-health alert. It is in the child with asthma, the young carer, the family whose journey to school is disrupted by flooding, and the pupil losing sleep because the future feels unmanageable.
The Department for Education cannot claim not to know this. Its own work has already identified overheating, flooding and water scarcity as three climate risks likely to affect education. Carbon Brief reported in 2024 that English schools could exceed an indoor “overheating” threshold of 26°C for more than a third of the academic year under 2°C of warming, rising to half the year under 4°C. Schools in the south and east of England, as well as London, are among those at greatest risk.
This issue is even more concerning for schools in East Anglia. As I argued recently in East Anglia Bylines, our region is often close to the sharp end of heat risk: warmer, drier and sunnier than many areas further west and north, with schools increasingly facing difficult decisions during heat-health alerts.
Climate risk is not a new safeguarding category
To be clear, I am not arguing that “climate change” should become a crude new safeguarding label. A heatwave, a flood, a drought warning, a pupil expressing climate worry – none of these are automatically a safeguarding concern. But any of these can become relevant when they affect a child’s welfare, attendance, behaviour, safety, access to learning, home circumstances or mental and physical health.
Climate risks are not always safeguarding concerns in themselves. They are safeguarding ‘amplifiers’. They can make existing vulnerabilities worse: poor housing, poverty, asthma, SEND, caring responsibilities, family stress, absence from education, transport problems, mental health difficulties, online misinformation and unequal access to safe outdoor space. And that is the distinction that the new KCSIE guidance misses.
Safeguarding is not only about spotting obvious harm after it has happened. It is also about noticing context. It is about asking what is happening around a child that might make them less safe, less visible, less able to learn, or less able to access support. Climate change is increasingly part of that context.
What schools can do now
The Department for Education may have failed to name climate change in KCSIE 2026, but schools do not have to wait for perfect guidance before acting with professional curiosity and care. The task is not to create a new category called “climate safeguarding”. It is to make existing safeguarding practice climate-literate.
That means helping staff ask better questions. During a heat-health alert, for example, the question is not simply: should school close? It is more complicated than that.
Which pupils are most at risk during hot weather? Which classrooms are unsafe? Which children may be safer in school than at home? Which children rely on school for water, food, supervision, routine or trusted adults? Is behaviour being interpreted without considering heat stress?
Children can be at greater risk
UKHSA guidance is clear that children can be at risk in hot weather because of their physiology, behaviour and activity levels. Heat stress may show as discomfort or irritability, while heat exhaustion can include tiredness, dizziness, headache, nausea, vomiting and excessive sweating. DfE advice also recognises that schools can often help protect children during hot weather through hydration, monitoring and practical adjustments, and that children may not be cooler at home.
The same logic applies to flooding. If a usually punctual pupil misses several days after local flooding, then arrives late with damp shoes and no PE kit, a climate-literate response does not jump straight to blame. It asks what may have happened around that child. Has their home been affected? Has transport changed? Has the family been displaced? Have belongings been lost? Is this absence a compliance issue, or a clue?
Water scarcity raises another set of questions. If drought or water disruption affects toilets, drinking water, hygiene, food preparation, medical needs or menstrual dignity, that is not just an estates inconvenience. It can affect children’s welfare and access to learning. The Environment Agency is already publishing 2026 drought and dry-weather reports for England.
Then there is emotional context. A young person who feels guilty every time they use electricity or eat meat is not automatically a safeguarding concern. But if climate worry affects sleep, attendance, concentration, self-care or safety, staff should use the pastoral and safeguarding routes they already know. A useful sentence might be simple: “You are not responsible for solving this on your own.”That is climate-literate safeguarding in plain English.
This is not about burdening teachers
Schools are already under pressure. Teachers are already carrying enough. Designated safeguarding leads are already managing complex responsibilities. Climate-literate safeguarding should not mean adding another heavy training burden. It should mean applying existing safeguarding habits to the conditions children are now living with.
It also means connecting safeguarding to each school’s Climate Action Plan. If heat, flooding, water disruption, air quality, access to nature and climate distress affect welfare, attendance, health and learning, then adaptation and resilience cannot sit in a separate sustainability document while safeguarding sits somewhere else.
One teacher, one eco-club or one safeguarding lead should not carry climate change. It is about joining the dots between school leaders, safeguarding teams, estates staff, SENDCos, pastoral teams, governors, sustainability leads and families.
As schools prepare September safeguarding updates, DSLs should consider adding a short climate-literate annex to their KCSIE 2026 training to help staff recognise when heat, flooding, water disruption, poor air quality, climate distress or misinformation may be part of the safeguarding context. Through my role at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, I have prepared an adaptable example resource for schools that would find a starting point useful.
The guidance may not name climate change, but schools can still notice when climate is changing the safeguarding context. Children should not have to wait for statutory guidance to catch up with the conditions in which they are already living and learning.
More from East Anglia Bylines
Bylines Network Gazette is out!
The latest Bylines Network Gazette is out now. Become a Friend of Bylines Network or upgrade to a paid Substack subscription, and you will get access to a vital collection of citizen articles and stories.
Journalism by the people, for the people.
