By Carolyn Wade, Danielle Heinrichs Henry and Danson Zheng
Climate crises impact schools. We spent months reading the policies that are supposed to help Australian school leaders when extreme weather threatens their schools. The analysis included sixteen state education department policies across every state and territory, covering floods, bushfires, heatwaves, cyclones and storms. We expected to find inconsistencies. What we did not expect was a Victorian government policy that defines an emergency as “an emergency”. We didn’t expect a Queensland policy that describes disruptive events as “disruptions to service delivery”.
These are not so much definitions as placeholders. Yet they are the documents principals are expected to rely on when deciding whether to close their school, send children home, or shelter students on site as conditions deteriorate.
The problem is no longer hypothetical
The Zurich-Mandala Climate Risk Index found two-thirds of Australian schools face high climate risk. That figure is projected to rise to 84 per cent by 2060. The most exposed schools are overwhelmingly government schools in disadvantaged areas, particularly those vulnerable to bushfire and flood. NSW and Queensland have more than 90% of schools in the three highest climate-risk categories. Four-fifths of low socio-educational-advantage schools face significant climate risk compared with about two-thirds of higher-advantage schools.
Climate disruption to schooling is not evenly distributed. It falls hardest on the communities with the least capacity to absorb it.
These risks are not confined to summer holidays. Australia’s school year runs from late January to mid-December. Six of those months overlap with what the National Emergency Management Agency calls the “higher risk weather season”. That’s when heatwaves, flooding, cyclones and bushfires are most likely. By February 2025, advocacy group Parents for Climate had already counted 297 school closure days across 121 schools due to extreme weather. Natural hazards cost $3.5 billion in insured losses in 2025. That’s on top of $2.2 billion lost in economic activity. The question is no longer whether extreme weather will disrupt Australian schools. It is whether the system has equipped school leaders to respond when it does.
Circular definitions, invisible thresholds
Our analysis of 16 state education department policies found the way hazards are defined in education policy is broad, inconsistent and circular. Most policies do not name specific weather hazards at all. Instead, they rely on umbrella terms like “emergency”, “critical incident”, or “disruptive event”. There is often no meaningful definition attached.
Where definitions do exist, they tend to borrow from state emergency legislation designed for coordinating fire services, police, and hospitals. These legislative frameworks were not written for a school leader deciding whether to send children home as a storm intensifies. Nor were they written for the kinds of situated, time-pressured judgements that characterise school-level hazard response.
This matters. Why? Before a principal can act, they need to determine whether what is unfolding outside their window actually “counts” as the emergency the policy is designed to address.
Almost none of the 16 policies provide measurable thresholds or criteria for making that judgement. The one exception is a Queensland heat policy that defines extreme heat as temperatures roughly five degrees above average for sustained periods. But even this requires the principal to know the local average temperature for that time of year, and it may not align with the Bureau of Meteorology’s own heatwave definition, which uses a different three-day metric. When the agency responsible for weather warnings and the department responsible for school policy use different definitions of the same hazard, the person left to reconcile them is the principal.
Responsible for everything, supported with almost nothing
The vague definitions become untenable when you examine who is expected to act on them. Across the 16 policies, responsibility for responding to hazards is overwhelmingly devolved to individual school leaders. They are instructed to take “reasonable” and “immediate” action and provide “timely” reporting.
What constitutes reasonable, immediate, or timely is rarely specified. One Queensland policy directs principals to “take immediate action and report the critical incidents”. But its own threshold document requires leaders to “assess individual incidents to determine if they meet the threshold for a school alert” without specifying what those thresholds are.
The expectation that principals will act is clear. What is much less clear is how they are meant to decide when action is necessary.
Where chains of command exist, they are designed for large-scale declared emergencies that trigger system-wide responses. Queensland offers the most detailed hierarchies, with one policy designating three tiers from Executive Response Controller down to the school leader.
But the weather events principals actually face are usually localised: a severe thunderstorm hitting one suburb, flash flooding near a single school, a heatwave concentrated in an inland town. A principal dealing with rapidly deteriorating conditions at half past two in the afternoon is not going to activate a multi-tiered departmental hierarchy. In that moment, the policies effectively position them as the sole decision-maker. The issue is compounded within single jurisdictions.
Four relevant policies
Queensland has four relevant policies, each specifying a different chain of command across separate documents. During a live weather event, a principal seeking clarity on who to contact and what authority they hold would need to navigate multiple policy documents simultaneously. Under pressure, that is not a realistic expectation.
The toll of operating in these conditions is already visible. Research examining principals’ experiences of critical incidents shows three-quarters of school leaders have experienced at least one critical incident during their career. These incidents require rapid decision-making under uncertainty while simultaneously managing student safety, staff wellbeing, and community expectations. Separately, the Australian Principal Occupational Health and Wellbeing Survey documents elevated rates of severe anxiety, depression, and intention to leave the profession. Extreme weather events represent yet another form of critical incident layered onto an already strained profession.
Agency without infrastructure is not autonomy; it is exposure.
What our analysis reveals is a structural arrangement that shifts liability downward while retaining authority upward. A principal who acts without clear policy backing assumes personal risk. A department that has not provided specific guidance is insulated from that same decision.
This silence is not neutral. It shapes the kind of crisis leadership that becomes possible, positioning principals as individually accountable decision-makers expected to exercise judgment with limited systemic support.
Climate volatility is no longer producing the kind of discrete, clearly-bounded emergencies these policies were built for. Schools are increasingly dealing with compounding, slow-onset, and ambiguous conditions. These include consecutive days of extreme heat, recurring smoke haze, repeated minor flooding. These conditions never trigger “emergency” thresholds as defined in the policies, yet they accumulate into genuine risks. The current policy architecture has no language for recognising this reality, let alone responding to it.
Recognising hazard
If school leaders are expected to carry this responsibility, then education systems need to consider more carefully what meaningful support looks like in practice. This includes clearer ways of recognising and responding to hazard conditions in schools, alongside guidance that reflects the local, fast-moving and cumulative nature of the situations principals now face. It also requires a shift in how climate-related disruption is understood, not as a seasonal interruption, but as an ongoing feature of schooling.
Asking principals to absorb this level of uncertainty may be framed as professional judgement. In practice it leaves them carrying risk that has not been adequately shared. And as these conditions become more frequent, the question is no longer whether schools will face them, but how prepared systems are to support those making decisions when they do.
Authors
From left to right: Carolyn Wade is a lecturer and research fellow at Griffith University, Australia. Her work explores educational leadership, parent engagement, and wellbeing through philosophical and critical lenses. Drawing on her experience in school leadership, she investigates how relational and interpretive practices can create more humane and sustainable conditions for educators. She is on LinkedIn.om left to right:
Danielle Heinrichs Henry is a senior lecturer in multilingual communication and literacies at Griffith University. She draws on her experience as a registered teacher of Spanish, German and EAL/D to investigate how crisis and disaster communication can be enhanced for multilingual communities. She is on LinkedIn. Danson Zheng is a sessional academic at the Griffith Institute for Educational Research, Griffith University. He has extensive research interests in sociology of education, policy studies, generative AI in Education, and qualitative methodologies.He is on LinkedIn.
This post draws on the authors’ forthcoming book chapter, “Cascading crises and school leaders in an era of climate volatility: Policy ambiguity in Australia”, which examines 16 Australian state education department policies on natural hazard response in schools. The chapter will appear in Educating for Risk In Times of Climate Change, to be published by Tirant lo Blanch.
This article was originally published on EduResearch Matters. Read the original article.
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