4 February 2025

RICK HIND: Do your kids come home from school red in the face and blowing like steam trains? My 10-year-old daughter rides her bike to and from school every day. Great. She's getting out, exercising at either end of the school day. Plenty of water from her ginormous metal water bottle, a dip in the pool, a bit of time under the fan and she's good to go again. You don't need to tell top enders about living with heat.

But what impact could extreme heat have on school students' ability to retain and use the information they learn? Why is the NT at higher risk than any other jurisdiction? And why could Katherine be harder hit by extreme heat and its impact on you finding a job more than any other town in Australia?

Alex Morgan is the Head of General Insurance at Zurich, which has produced a report called ‘The Impact of Climate Change on Australia's Schools’. Alex, good morning.
 

ALEX MORGAN: Good morning.
 

RICK HIND: How do heat and warming temperatures affect a student's ability to learn in the classroom?
 

ALEX MORGAN: Well, in our report we've pulled together some concepts that most people pretty readily understand. Missing days at school ultimately hurts your education and sweltering in extreme heat makes it hard to think. So, with the weather becoming more volatile, we're seeing more frequent and severe weather events – floods, fires, cyclones – and we're facing more days of extreme heat. If a school's closed because there's been a natural event, you're missing days of learning. If you're missing days of learning, ultimately your results are going to be worse.
 

RICK HIND: The NT is only fourth in terms of risk from climate change compared to other states and territories, but it has the highest chances of extreme consequences. Can you drill into that difference for us?
 

ALEX MORGAN: The driver of consequence that we see has a lot to do with your exposure to the natural perils themselves – these floods, fires or cyclones – and plenty of Northern Territorians will be exposed to those. But it also has a lot to do with extreme heat. And again, the Territory is a hot place. What we're seeing in the Northern Territory is that if we don't seek to mitigate the impacts of climate change, we could see an average reduction in academic attainment of almost 6 per cent. In some areas, like in numeracy, that reduction could be greater than 7 per cent. Very remote schools are even more impacted, with a reduction of over 11 per cent [in numeracy]. So, across the nation, what does it mean if you reduce your academic attainment? Well, ultimately it impacts your chances in the job market. We see across Australia that the warming of the planet and climate impacts could see a reduction in lifetime earnings of almost $73,000. That's one year of average wages for an Australian.
 

RICK HIND: Your report says that exposure to extreme heat in your school years could reduce your chances of finding a job. That Katherine is the town that could be most affected in the country. Do we know why that would be?
 

ALEX MORGAN: It's really a combination of Katherine's exposure to firstly, heat. All of the Territory is reasonably hot compared to the rest of the nation, but it's also exposed to some of those natural perils, particularly some of these schools which are potentially impacted by flooding and fire events.
 

RICK HIND: Four in the top 10 most at-risk schools in Australia are in the NT. Number two on the list is St. Francis Xavier Catholic School in Daly River. That's the second most at-risk in the country after number one in Wilcannia, which is a really hot part of Far Western NSW with a big First Nations population. It wouldn't possibly shock people in the top end to learn that Daly River is at particular risk because Daly River has been evacuated at pretty regular intervals in the last few years due to flooding. Can you talk us through how extreme weather events like flooding, even bushfires, can affect students in the classroom in the days, weeks and months after the initial event?
 

ALEX MORGAN: The biggest problem is that students typically aren't in the classroom in the days and weeks after an event. It's those missed days of education that see the impact add up. The interesting thing that the report draws out is that climate impact is not evenly distributed across Australia. We see very clearly that schools and its pupils in very remote and even regional areas have a more significant impact than those in our cities. Even within the cities, the outer metro areas have a more significant impact than what we see on the coastal fringe. Young kids also just aren't as resilient. That's another factor that we see, with primary schools ultimately taking a bigger hit than our high schools.
 

RICK HIND: You're listening to 105.7 ABC Radio Darwin. Rick Hind with you. Alex Morgan is Head of General Insurance, Zurich Australia. They've compiled a report about the impact of climate change on Australia's schools. Can I ask Alex, first of all, why is Zurich so interested in this topic? You insure a lot of schools?
 

ALEX MORGAN: We are an insurer of schools, but more than that, global insurers like Zurich are a huge store of data. What we're trying to do through this report is bring to bear some of the insights we have in our proprietary climate modelling and also what we see as impacts of weather events around the world, to really try to begin, or continue, a community conversation on the topic of resilience. What is it that we can do in the face of more volatile weather to harden our assets and protect our communities? What can we do to prepare schools for what is increasingly inevitable weather disruptions?
 

RICK HIND: What can you do? People listening in Katherine would know that the temperature is often in the high 30’s for much of the year. It's right near a river which floods relatively often. What can you do to make your schools, your communities, more climate resilient so that students aren't affected in this way?
 

ALEX MORGAN: It's a wicked problem in a lot of ways, but there are things that schools can do and there are things that communities can do. When it comes to extreme heat, we can look at some of the basics. Do we have appropriate shade cover? Do we have appropriate tree canopy? Are we trying to reduce the overall temperature not just in classrooms – and in the classrooms is where air conditioning can make a difference, where it exists – but outside the classrooms. Because we do know that a child who overheats at recess and lunchtime will struggle to cool down and begin learning when they re-enter the classroom.

We then need to think about the broader physical resilience. Do schools have appropriate drainage? Is the roofing built to withstand high winds and hails? Do schools have bushfire plans and appropriate clearance around them to protect them from fires? And finally, this report focuses on the existing stock of some 10,000 schools we have across the country, but we also need to think about where we're building new schools and where we’re placing new communities. Frankly, we need to stop building subdivisions in floodplains, and we need to stop putting new schools in harm's way.
 

RICK HIND: We've had some communities move their schools, move a lot of their community infrastructure uphill just to avoid having to leave whenever the flooding happens. Is that something that needs to happen at the planning stage so we don't have a whole bunch of people living in a floodplain?
 

ALEX MORGAN: It certainly makes more sense from our perspective to plan in advance. Moving a school or moving a community is difficult, and it's very expensive. Positioning it in an appropriate place from the outset makes a whole lot of sense, but that's not always possible. We've got communities that exist today, and that's where all three layers of government, as well as residents and ratepayers, need to have conversations around what can be done to protect infrastructure that exists in place today.
 

RICK HIND: Alex Morgan is the Head of General Insurance at Zurich Australia. Alex, when I look at these national reports often you get to the NT part and it says "N/A: we don't have information for that, it's too small”. There is information, very detailed information, about the Northern Territory. But one thing that stuck out to me is that every school in the NT is considered regional. All 190 odd schools. Is that right? People in Darwin don't think they're living regionally, they think they're living in a metropolitan area. Are we kidding ourselves?
 

ALEX MORGAN: I think that comes down to how we've defined that within the scope of the report. Absolutely, Darwin is not a remote community, but nor is it a metro area of the size and scale of Sydney or Melbourne. Irrespective of the definition, the way the report has been structured and the way we've looked at the data is that we've taken all (almost 10,000) schools across the nation – and as you say close to 200 are in the NT – and we've looked the geospatial location of every one of those schools. We've looked at the latitude & longitude and the positioning, in terms of elevation from riverbanks and the like. Ultimately, irrespective of the definition, the impact remains the same. The Northern Territory is exposed.
 

RICK HIND: Looking at the breakdown, you look at really quite advantaged schools in each jurisdiction and disadvantaged schools. The NT's most expensive school is Haileybury Rendall School in Berrimah – it's in the 79th percentile of a thing called ‘the Index of Community Socio-Educational Advantage’. But the other schools that you talk about that have advantage are all in the 90th percentile. In terms of statistics, is that what you see? As we're regional rather than metro, we don't have super advantaged schools anywhere in the Territory?
 

ALEX MORGAN: The definition of regional or metro doesn't directly result in socioeconomic advantage or disadvantage, but it is an important point that you raise. We see from this report that the impact of climate change on children's education is not evenly distributed. Disadvantaged schools face much higher climate risk. Over 80 per cent of Australian schools in the lowest Social-Educational Advantage decile – the lowest 10 per cent in the measure – face significant climate risk. This compares to only about 60 per cent of schools in the highest advantage decile. Some of that comes down to location and where those schools exist, and we know there is a socioeconomic gap between the very remote parts of Australia and our metro areas. That can drive a lot of the difference.
 

RICK HIND: Well, let's look at another school that's in Minjilang. That's a very remote school with 53 students, four teachers. You're expecting the impact in attainment to be extreme. Drops of 31 per cent in spelling, 114 per cent in grammar and punctuation, 36 per cent in numeracy. I'm not casting any shade on Minjilang's teachers and students to say that their results wouldn't be comparable to kids in a big high school in Sydney, but where you're already disadvantaged, you're going to see even worse effects and massive drops in attainment?
 

ALEX MORGAN: That's a very real possibility. You're right, the report doesn't seek in any way to criticise the schools that exist today or the teachers that are there. They're doing a wonderful job, by and large. What we're looking to do is have a conversation around prioritisation of investment. What is it that we can do to help those schools that are in a position of most disadvantage to bridge some of that gap? We sent this report to all of the severely impacted schools’ principals around the country and we're hoping that they will be able to use this in some way to spark a conversation with their local communities and government representatives about the needs of those schools.
 

RICK HIND: Alex Morgan from Zurich, Australia, thanks for explaining some of this to us on 105.7 ABC Radio Darwin.
 

ALEX MORGAN: Thank you.
 

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