Schools across Europe are closing due to heat. What does this tell us?
School closures and shortened school days due to heat are increasingly common across Europe, and they reflect a structural gap in how our cities and public buildings have been designed. Classroom temperatures in the Netherlands have reached 40°C in some buildings during this heatwave, according to the AOb teaching union, which also estimates that €1.3 billion per year is needed to bring Dutch school buildings up to basic health standards. These figures point to a long-term underinvestment in the heat resilience of public infrastructure.
Critically, repeated school closures are not a viable long-term solution. Disruptions to education accumulate over time, affecting learning outcomes and placing compounding pressure on families and children.
When children are sent home, where do they go?
Children are frequently sent home to environments that are even hotter than their schools. In older urban neighbourhoods, often lower-income areas, homes are poorly ventilated and trap heat. These are also typically the least green parts of the city, with less tree cover and fewer parks within easy reach. Residents are less likely to have access to air conditioning or fans, and may face greater barriers to reaching public cooling spaces. A child sent home at midday to an apartment in a dense urban district is not necessarily cooler or safer. School closures do not solve the heat problem — they move it somewhere less visible.
Who bears the cost when schools close?
The most direct cost falls on the children themselves, who lose learning time. But the ripple effects reach working parents and disproportionately women. Each unplanned closure means someone has to stay home, find last-minute childcare, or bring a child to work. In the Netherlands, nearly 60% of women work part-time, roughly three times the OECD average. Gender gaps widen with parenthood as mothers take on a greater share of unpaid care work (OECD, Part-time and Partly Equal, 2019).
There is also a darker dimension: a growing body of research links extreme heat to increased rates of domestic violence, with heatwaves associated with a measurable rise in intimate partner violence incidents (Le, 2025, SAGE Open; Dey et al., 2025, JAMA Network Open). Children sent home into already stressed households are not simply inconvenienced — some are sent into environments made less safe by the heat itself.
What should Dutch cities be investing in, and will this get worse?
Europe is the fastest-warming continent on Earth, having warmed at more than twice the global average rate since the 1980s (Copernicus Climate Change Service / ECMWF, European State of the Climate 2024 & 2025), and KNMI data shows that heatwaves in the Netherlands which once arrived roughly once a decade now occur approximately every three years.
What can we do? First, school building upgrades: improved ventilation, passive cooling, and green schoolyards should be part of any serious climate adaptation plan. Second, heat-responsive urban planning and public infrastructure: more trees, permeable surfaces, greener streets and parks, and accessible cooling centres in the neighbourhoods with the highest heat risk — built in permanently, not deployed as emergency responses.
Air conditioning is not the answer; it is energy-intensive, accelerates warming, and is not accessible to everyone. Cities that invest in nature-based solutions and building adaptation significantly reduce both peak temperatures and the health burden on their populations. The investments Dutch cities make now will determine how liveable those cities are for the next generation.
Valerie Brown is a Climate Resilience & Urban Heat Expert based in The Hague, with over a decade of experience working with cities across Europe and internationally, including Amsterdam, Rotterdam and The Hague. She has published on urban heat through the Resilient Cities Network and C40 Cities Finance Facility.