28. June 2026

The UK heatwave shut our schools. Yet nobody shut the deadlines - if anything it got worse....

What a week it was last week! The HOTTEST June we've ever had.

My eldest was away in Devon for her Year 6 residential (33 children in 34+ degrees.....Lord help the teachers), which meant I thought I had the easiest week of my Summer just managing x1 mini me. Playdates arranged, clubs booked - I was going to get so much done.

But no. Of COURSE that would be too easy. My daughter's school closed from Tuesday. No warning the night before, just a message at 7:14am while I was straightening my hair with one hand and packing a lunch box with the other.

"Due to the red weather warning, school will be closed for the rest of the week for the safety of the children and our staff. We apologise for the inconvenience."

Inconvenience. That's one word for it. Of course I understood - no-one wants their child to be uncomfortable, and I knew she'd be in her element in the pool with lots of ice cream and Mummy to herself.

Here's another: impossible. Because my calendar didn't get that same message. My 9:30 didn't cancel itself. My deadlines didn't shuffle politely to the right. The only thing that moved was me, scrambling to rearrange an entire working day around a child, a heatwave, and the quiet expectation that I'd just make it work.

And I did make it work. Because that's what we do. We always make it work.

But "making it work" looked like me on a Teams call from my office (most the day!) while my daughter ate ice lollies in the masses and spent the day running around in a swimming costume. It looked like replying to emails at 10pm because the day had been a write-off of applying sun scream, snacks (IYKYK), heat meltdowns (hers and mine) and trying to sound professional on a call while someone was desperate for my attention for 10 minutes.

That is not a flex. That is survival.

This is not about the weather

The heatwave will pass. But what it exposed will not, unless we talk about it honestly.

Every time something unplanned happens, whether it is a school closure, a child who is ill, a nursery that shuts early, the same thing plays out. The working mum absorbs it. She reshapes her day, drops her standards for herself, over-delivers later to compensate, and tells everyone she's fine.

She is not fine. She is exhausted. And she is doing the maths on whether this is sustainable.

That maths is where you lose her.

What it actually felt like this week

I want to be honest about this because nobody is!! Everyone tries to be the bloody hero when sometimes we just need to say it's really shit!

It felt like guilt. Guilt for not being fully present for my daughter on a day she was home and hot and bored and wanted me. Guilt for not being fully present at work when I had things I'd committed to. Guilt for being short-tempered by 4pm because I'd been doing two jobs in 38-degree heat since 7am and hadn't eaten a meal that didn't come out of a packet.

It felt like loneliness. Because when you look at the group chat and everyone is saying "ugh, kids are home, bit of a nightmare!" with a laughing emoji, it sounds like we are all handling it. We are not all handling it. Some of us are quietly falling apart and smiling about it because that is what is expected.

And it felt like anger. Not at my daughter. Not even at the school. At the assumption, baked into everything, that someone will pick it up. That "someone" is almost always a woman. And she almost always does it silently. In my case, my husband can't work from home - if he could.. he would!

For the working mum reading this in the heat

You are not failing because your house looks like a bomb site and you missed a deadline and your child ate cereal for dinner. You are holding together a system that was not designed for days like this. Nobody is doing it gracefully. The mums who look like they are have just had more practice at hiding it.

Give yourself permission to do a bad job at everything for 48 hours. A bad job done is better than a perfect job imagined. Lower the bar, get through it, and stop performing okayness for people who are not watching as closely as you think.

Your career will not collapse because of two hot days. Your health might, if you keep pretending you are fine.

For the manager reading this

If someone on your team has children and their school closed this week, they worked. I promise you they worked. It just didn't look the way you're used to.

They probably didn't tell you they were struggling, because the last thing a working mum wants is to be seen as the one who can't cope. She has spent her entire return building the case that motherhood hasn't changed her capability. She is not going to undo that by admitting Wednesday was a disaster.

So here's what you can do. Don't wait for her to raise it. Send a message that says: "I know this week has been brutal with the school closures. If anything needs to shift, just tell me and we'll sort it." That is it. One message. It costs you nothing and it tells her she is working somewhere that sees her as a whole person.

Because the alternative, the one where she smiles and says she's fine and quietly updates her LinkedIn that evening, is far more expensive for you than a moved deadline.

The bit nobody says out loud

We have built a working world that functions perfectly as long as nothing unexpected happens to your children. The moment it does, the whole thing buckles, and it buckles on the parent. Almost always the mother.

School closures are not edge cases. They happen every winter for snow, every summer for heat, every term for inset days, and every other week for the bug doing the rounds. If your business model requires your people to have uninterrupted childcare 52 weeks a year, your business model has a gap. And that gap is being plugged, invisibly, by women who are running on empty and calling it coping.

The heatwave didn't create this problem. It just made it impossible to hide for 4 days.

What I'd love to see change

Stop treating school closures as a personal problem for the parent to solve. Start treating them as an operational reality that good businesses plan for.

Build the assumption of disruption into your culture, not as an exception but as a given. Because when you do, the women who are currently spending their energy managing the guilt spend it on the work instead. And they are brilliant at the work. You already know that. That is why you hired them.

If this week felt like chaos, you are not alone. If you smiled through it and you are now reading this at 11pm because it is the first time you have sat down, I see you.

You are doing an incredible job. Even on the days it does not feel like it.

Especially on those days.

Hannah x