Climate Resilient Schools

In 2022/23, the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, partnered with the Department for Education and Thames Water to make up to 100 London schools more resilient to the impacts of climate change. Measures include improving water efficiency, reducing surface water flood risk, helping schools create climate adaptation plans and teaching children the importance of climate adaptation.

The Climate Resilient Schools project has targeted those most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, prioritising the top 10 per cent of schools with highest surface water flood risk and that fall within the worst bands of the Climate Risk Map. Flooding can have a major impact on schools. In the summer of 2007, flooding in England resulted in widespread school closures that amounted to 400,000 lost pupil school days, at an estimated economic cost of £12m.

Below is an outline of the programme with a list of schools that are involved in the programme at the end.

The Climate Resilient Schools Programme is now closed, there are some resources at the end of this page to related work. 

There have been four strands to the programme that have been delivered over the last few months:

1. SuDS rain planters – 72 schools have received 564 SuDS rain planters helping to reduce flood risk by capturing rainwater from roofs and they also provided biodiversity and wellbeing benefits.  We have had lots of great feedback from schools letting us know how pleased they are with their SuDS rain planters. 
2. Smarter Business Visits - Thames Water’s free Smarter Business Visits have been looking to address leaks and install water efficient fitting in schools. For example, tap restrictors, urinal sensors, converting single-flush to dual-flush. 28 schools have had visits, saving over 500,000 litres of water per day. That’s 1 Olympic swimming pool saved over a week! 
3. Weather Stations and educational resources – We have installed weather stations on 24 schools with loggers in 30 SuDS rain planters to monitor their effectiveness. This is the most extensive network of weather stations in schools that we know of. Associated education resources have been produced including a poster about the weather station, a data dashboard for in-classroom demos and in-class hardware weather station demos. You can see more about this project and the data on the FreeStation website.
4. Climate Adaptation Plans – 60 schools have received bespoke climate adaptation plans to help identify potential adaptation measures that could be implemented in the future to tackle the risks posed by a changing climate and extreme weather events. Each school was surveyed to determine high risk areas in their school and then measures and interventions were suggested to help tackle these risks. These measures might include green roofs or window shading to reduce overheating. Read the overview report giving a summary of the surveys and recommendations.