The week your fire strategy gets propped open

It’s 30 degrees outside, but step inside a south-facing classroom mid-afternoon and it feels closer to an oven. The air is dead, and thirty kids are visibly melting.

The natural, human response? Grab a wedge, a chair, or a heavy textbook and prop open the corridor door to catch a breeze. Let's be honest, you can't really blame the teaching staff—they’re just trying to make the room bearable and get everyone through to the end of the day.

It’s easy to see a door wedge as a harmless, temporary fix. What some staff often don’t realise is that wedging open a fire door essentially tears up the assumptions in your Fire Risk Assessment (FRA).

If the worst happens:

• Smoke and fire have a free pass right into the escape corridors.
  
  
• Your primary escape routes fill up with smoke way faster than the FRA calculates.

Fire doors do exactly one job: they buy you time. Prop one open, and you're just giving that time away. Yes, the fire brigade could theoretically issue enforcement notices, but we all know the immediate, daily headache is just trying to keep the building safe without getting into a tug-of-war with overheated staff.

The problem isn't going away—classrooms do get uncomfortably hot. So, rather than just doing the daily summer patrol to kick the wedges away, it helps to arm staff with a few practical alternatives:

• Get ahead of the heat: Open windows first thing in the morning while the air's still cool — or overnight ONLY if security and insurance allow it. Once the outdoor air gets warmer than the air inside, shut the windows and pull the blinds down to keep the heat out.
  
  
• Kill the unused equipment: Interactive whiteboards, projectors, and PCs pump out a surprising amount of ambient heat, especially left on standby. If they're not being actively used, get them off at the wall.
  
  
• Change the scenery: If a room's genuinely unbearable, have a backup plan to move the lesson — a north-facing hall, the library, or a shaded spot outside.
  
  
• Keep them hydrated: Encourage pupils to keep topping up their water bottles throughout the day. A trip to the toilets to splash cold water on the wrists is also a surprisingly effective way to cool down fast.
  
  
• Schedule adjustments: Move PE and anything physical to the early morning where you can — DHSC guidance is clear that vigorous activity should be avoided on very hot days, with lessons adapted to something more sedentary instead.
  
  
• Uniform flexibility: A temporary hot-weather dress code is fine and DfE-supported — loose, light-coloured clothing, sunhats, blazers and jumpers off.