This section contains useful information for parents of children at Evelina London Children’s Hospital who are pupils or prospective pupils of Evelina Hospital School.
School can be a daunting or anxious experience for a small number of children; perhaps they have had difficulties at their home school. Our intimate hospital setting and high staff–pupil ratio provides many opportunities to see school from a different perspective.
Children with chronic medical conditions who have fallen behind with school work due to long periods of absence, often welcome the personal attention they are given.
Many use the opportunity to revise or catch-up on basic skills missed in their home school.
If the nurses say your child is able to attend, just come along to the school, which is on level three of Evelina London Children’s Hospital and complete a simple admission form.
If your child’s first school session is taught by the bedside, school staff will supply you with the admission form.
Your child will only receive a visit from a teacher or attend the school if they are considered well enough to benefit from education. You can make your child’s stay in hospital as enjoyable and productive as possible by taking the time to meet the school staff and helping to settle them into a learning activity.
Providing information about your child is particularly important for younger children and those with special educational needs. Parents or carers of children aged 2–5 are encouraged to spend time settling their child into the classroom to ensure they feel at ease in the hospital school.
Please ensure school staff have a contact number should we need to get hold of you.
If your child is with us for more than a week we will, with your permission, contact your child’s home school. Our staff will then tailor learning activities for your child that complement or mirror work being taught by the home school. We will have work sent from the home school to be done in hospital, or share the pupil’s progress at Evelina Hospital School with the home school.
Our teachers will also create opportunities to develop personal and social skills.
If the school has been advised that your child is likely to be in hospital for months, our teachers will discuss any special teaching requirements with the headteacher (for example, if your child requires one-to-one teaching assistant support throughout the school day, or a GCSE tutor in a subject not normally covered by the school’s teaching staff).
We would love to persuade your child to learn with a ward teacher, or to come down to the schoolroom with you. However, we quite understand that many children will need a staged approach to engaging with new adults, especially when they are already coping with an unfamiliar hospital environment.
You are very welcome to register your child for education in the normal way and explain the circumstances to the ward school staff.
We are not an examination centre. We however can work with schools on a case by case basis to accommodate the needs of long-term pupils. Please contact the child’s link worker for further information.
Yes. If you wish to have hospital school attendance transferred to your child’s home school register, you should ask for a Certificate of Attendance from our school office or from the teacher who has been teaching your child. Then hand it in to your child’s school explaining your child has been attending a Department for Education hospital school while he or she has been in hospital. The school should acknowledge this attendance on your child’s attendance register.
Any child who is too unwell to attend their home school for two weeks or more is entitled to a home tutor provided by your local authority. Each local authority has its own way of organising home tuition, so your first step is to speak to your child’s school as soon as possible.
You will require a letter, preferably signed by a consultant, verifying that your child is too unwell to attend school, but well enough to access education for a certain number of hours a day in the family home. Speak to the hospital medical team before you leave the hospital.
If you require any further assistance with regard to this, please contact your child’s school.
A link to our school’s policies and reports can be found here.
Getting your feedback and views on our school is really important to us. Ofsted has a dedicated website for gathering parents’ and carers’ views and we would be very grateful if you could log on and tell us how well you feel our school is doing. Click the link below.
It takes no more than five minutes and may be useful to us in shaping and improving our school.