51����

In Europe, there are snow days - when schools close as thick, icy blankets of white envelop the land - but in Oman, the equivalent might be described, a little less romantically and succinctly, as “thunderously heavy rainfall days”.

Different types of precipitation, same headache of school closures - and, typically, same wave of euphoria from pupils given an unexpected day off.

“Oman normally experiences up to three days of rainfall each year, and these days are greeted by our students rushing around outside getting wet on purpose,” says Kai Vacher, principal of the British School Muscat.

“Water is scarce, sacred and a novelty in this part of the world, and must be celebrated.”

However, there is a concern that this novelty is becoming more common as climate change wreaks havoc with meteorological norms and presents school leaders with planning challenges they may never have had before.

Extreme weather events increasing

For example, in April 2024, Oman experienced the heaviest rainfall in decades; the mood was often fraught and far from celebratory. The government closed schools in several regions, including Muscat, as a precaution.

“Our campus is built on a hillside with an 18-metre drop from the top to the bottom of the site,” says Vacher. “When it rains, waterfalls cascade down the many staircases and make the site hazardous within minutes.”

Once it stops raining, the site can dry out within a few hours and can quickly be operational again. And after last year’s heavy rains - when the school was closed for three days - there was no serious damage.

The main issue the school had to grapple with was rescheduling a student expedition on Jebel Shams, the highest mountain in Oman, until tracks had been repaired.

• Research: Are these the 20 essentials to ‘unlocking’ high-quality teaching?
• Pedagogy: How metacognition can be effective in early years
• Curriculum: Pupils’ poor socioemotional skills need curriculum attention

However, Vacher says extreme weather events are becoming more frequent as climate change shakes up the global kaleidoscope of weather patterns.

“Over the past decade, Oman has experienced rising temperatures, more intense heatwaves and increased extreme weather events, like cyclones and heavy rainfall,” he explains.

Meanwhile, rain has been causing a headache for leaders at Tanglin Trust School in Singapore.

In March, staff were preparing for a monsoon surge. The school did not have to close, but six staff and 30 Year 12 students on a field trip on Tioman Island, in Malaysia, were stranded after the local authorities imposed a travel ban owing to rough seas.

In the end, students and staff made it home safely, a few days late, but the school’s chief executive, Craig Considine, says that the government in Singapore has recently been focusing more on ensuring schools have plans ready for extreme weather.

The school now has various weather-related policies and plans - for heat and sun, thunder and lightning, and haze - and is increasingly using the group to help with planning and support in managing extreme situations.

Continuous adaptation

Heat, especially, is becoming a real concern.

In Muscat, temperatures can reach well over 40C in summer, Vacher notes. Students are often kept inside at breaktimes to keep cool in climate-controlled spaces. However, the school has never had to close because of heat - at least not yet.

Amaral Cunha, head of Escola Eleva in Brazil, has also not had to close his school due to heat, but in February 2025, it implemented emergency measures in response to record temperatures of above 44C in Rio de Janeiro.

“We reinforced ventilation in classrooms, expanded access to hydration, adjusted physical activities to more suitable times and created air-conditioned spaces for greater comfort,” says Cunha, who adds that, with heatwaves and storms becoming more frequent, “continuous adaptation” is now part of life.

Protocols relating to extreme weather have been revised, he says, and there has been extra investment in infrastructure “to make the school environment more prepared for these conditions”.

Cunha adds: “We continue to monitor climate change and look for innovations that can contribute to the safety and wellbeing of students, always keeping academic excellence as a priority.”

Impact of the climate crisis

The experience of international school leaders on the ground is backed up by expert reports on the impact of the climate crisis.

The UN’s World Meteorological Organization published a report in March, , which says that last year was “the warmest year in the 175-year observational record” and “each of the past 10 years, 2015-2024, were individually the 10 warmest years on record”.

There were “numerous significant heatwaves in 2024”, the report says. “Amongst the most significant events was the June heatwave in Saudi Arabia, when temperatures near Mecca reached 50C,” it notes in soberly alarming terms.

There were mentions, too, of drought, wildfires and flooding - including “extreme rainfall” and “severe flash flooding” in the Valencia region of Spain on 29 October 2024.

Daniel Jones, chief education officer at Globeducate, lives in Valencia, where the international schools group also runs Cambridge House British International School.

The scale of the flooding that hit the Spanish city was “horrendous”, says Jones. More than 200 people died and incredible images of cars choking the streets, having been swept along in the floodwaters, shocked the world.

Cambridge House was not directly affected because it sits at the north of the city - the flooding was to the south - but “the whole area was a disaster zone”, says Jones.

“All of Valencia city was closed. We couldn’t get the teachers out to the school to teach, students couldn’t come out - there were no buses available and half of the roads had been swept away as well,” he adds.

Weighing up school closures

But the authorities were not leading. Jones says that, initially, there was “no clarity from the local council as to whether the school should open or close”.

Decisions to close schools - as Vacher points out - are “not always straightforward”. Whatever leaders decide, their choices will inevitably be unpopular with some.

He says that if you must close a school, the key is to make “a quick, well-informed decision” and to share it “through multiple channels”.

Vacher has honed a strategy for dealing with unexpected events, the first point of which is communication: “Timely and clear communications are an absolute must, using all forms of messaging.”

He also advises watching multiple forecasts and having messages drafted, as well as being prepared to continue learning remotely.

Keeping abreast of the responses from schools in similar situations is also advisable. Vacher is part of a WhatsApp group with other international school principals in Muscat, allowing him to monitor what other schools are doing, “rather than responding to rumours”.

In Valencia, Cambridge House was ultimately closed for less than a week in the wake of the catastrophic flooding in Spain. Now, however, Jones feels local leaders - rocked by what happened in October 2024 - have gone from indecision to being too quick to close schools.

In March, for example, the school was told to close for three days because storms were forecast, yet Jones says it hardly rained in the end.

Pull of online learning

Vacher says the authorities in Oman also seem more minded to close schools if adverse weather looms, because they know, given experience in recent years, that it is possible to shift to online learning.

“We have online learning materials prepared as part of our annual planning cycle. This was not the case pre-Covid,” he says.

“We also have templates for communicating with staff and parents, so we can amend those communications very quickly and easily.”

When Cambridge House in Valencia closed last month, the school fired up its “Covid protocols”.

“We moved to online learning and the teachers were all available,” says Jones. “Of course, we were well used to doing that five years ago with Covid, so it wasn’t difficult to get that up and running again.”

Eyes in the sector, it seems, are wide open to the challenges ahead: the pragmatic expectation among many international school leaders is that the weather is likely to become increasingly unpredictable, and that pre-emptive, coordinated action is essential.

However, leaders also feel better equipped thanks to all the hard-won lessons from another extreme event; the pandemic wreaked havoc with schools around the world, but it also taught some valuable and lasting lessons.

For essential weekly intelligence on the international schools sector, sign up for the