London is baking again, and primary schools across the city are scrambling to manage extreme temperatures while keeping parents informed and children safe.
Comms expert Adam Smith argues that how schools handle heatwave communication reveals uncomfortable truths about how corporations manage predictable crises.
At first glance, a FTSE 100 boardroom and a London primary school staffroom appear to have almost nothing in common, but the communication failures are strikingly similar.
Smith points to a colleague who received an urgent email from her child’s school at precisely 11:15 AM, informing her that school would close at noon that same day.
“Due to the extreme heat, school will close today at 12:00 PM. Please arrange an immediate collection,” the message read, giving working parents less than 45 minutes to abandon their desks.
Smith is direct in his assessment: this was not an unforeseeable emergency, given that the heatwave had been forecast for weeks well in advance.
Not every school failed the test, however, with Smith noting that his son’s school made an early, definitive call to cancel a trip to Kensington Palace entirely.
Corralling 30 boiling seven-year-olds among an agitated commuter crowd on the Central Line during a heatwave, Smith notes, would likely have been a disaster waiting to happen.
He describes that early, proactive decision as a masterclass in logistics, precisely because it was communicated clearly and ahead of time rather than at the last minute.
The comparison to corporate behaviour is the central point Smith wants business leaders to take seriously, identifying three recurring communication failures that plague both schools and boardrooms.
The first is what he calls the stakeholder dance, where a seemingly endless array of decision-makers must be consulted before any communication is approved or distributed internally or externally.
The second is analysis paralysis, where organisations wait for perfect data rather than making an authoritative call based on objectivity and experience, often watching to see what rivals do first.
The third failure is the chaotic pivot, where staying silent to avoid conflict leads to a last-minute announcement that frustrates an already impatient audience when pressure reaches breaking point.
Smith, who is co-founder at VCCP Roar, argues that these traps are entirely avoidable when organisations commit to genuine advance planning rather than reactive damage control.
His conclusion for C-suite leaders is unambiguous: clear, early, planned and decisive communication always beats a late and panicked response, regardless of whether the audience is shareholders or parents on a school WhatsApp group.
The broader lesson is that glaringly predictable future events should never be treated as a bolt from the blue, and that failure to plan leaves everyone hot, bothered and desperately looking for someone to blame.