Radhika Sanghani

Radhika Sanghani writes features and opinion pieces that use lived experience to interrogate how public systems and cultural expectations affect women, children and families. Her education coverage sits inside a wider interest in social affairs, connecting classroom realities to health, safety and inequality. She works as a freelance journalist, contributing long-form work to national newspapers and magazines as well as to The Independent.

Overheated classrooms and school infrastructure

Her recent reporting on Britain’s overheated classrooms focuses on the basic conditions in which children are expected to learn.

She looks at heat levels, ventilation and building quality, and sets these against what pupils, teachers and parents describe happening in lessons when classrooms reach 30 degrees. The work connects infrastructure problems to concentration, fatigue and the wider question of whether schools are physically equipped for a changing climate.

She treats school buildings as part of the education system’s duty of care, rather than a neutral backdrop, and uses detailed accounts from those inside the classroom to show what it feels like when that duty is not met.

UK maternity care and systemic failings

Alongside education, Sanghani writes extensively on the UK’s maternity crisis and the experience of giving birth within the National Health Service.

In her coverage of maternity care she draws on data about maternal deaths, case studies of avoidable harm and recent scandals to explain why pregnant women are seeking alternatives or extra safeguards. She uses her own perspective as a journalist and expectant mother to frame wider questions about trust in institutions, the availability of dedicated midwives and the impact of NHS failings on families.

The work is grounded in numbers and specific examples, but it is driven by how policy decisions and service pressures translate into fear, risk and difficult choices for parents.

Body image, campaigns and self-worth

Sanghani’s long-running interest in body image shows in pieces about appearance, self-worth and public campaigns.

She has been covered by The Independent for launching a social media movement encouraging women to celebrate their big noses using the hashtag #sideprofileselfie, and her writing returns to themes of representation, shame and confidence. In this strand of her work she reports on how cultural messages and visual norms affect young people and adults, and she highlights individual stories that illustrate the gap between lived reality and mainstream beauty standards. The campaign work is treated as part of her journalism, using reporting and commentary to turn an online trend into a broader conversation about identity.

Features and opinion across lifestyle and social affairs

Beyond these specific topics, Sanghani has more than a decade of experience writing features, interviews and opinion pieces for national broadsheets and magazines.

Her portfolio spans lifestyle, health, wellness, travel and business, with a consistent focus on how structural issues meet everyday life. She writes in formats that range from first-person essays to reported features and Q&A interviews, and she is experienced in editing and commissioning as well as writing.

Across outlets she often returns to questions of women’s health, modern relationships, workplace pressures and the emotional impact of policy decisions.

Her work reaches beyond print into broadcast appearances, where she discusses the same themes on radio and television. She also writes fiction and for screen, which gives her an additional storytelling lens when she approaches complex social topics as a journalist.

Taken together, her journalism, campaign activity and creative projects mark her out as a writer who is interested in how systems feel from the inside, and who uses narrative detail to make debates about education, health and body image immediate and human.