Health News - ‘They want to engage with school, even when they are coping with high levels of trauma’

Published: 27 January, 2011
by TOM FOOT

Great Ormond Street school head in tribute to children as she steps down

IT is the school where teachers wear special infection masks, MacBook computers come as standard and the headteacher can be excused for not knowing all the pupils’ names.

The Children’s School at Great Ormond Street Hospital has been teaching sick youngsters since 1951. It has grown in size and scope since then to include child cancer patients in University College Hospital. 

But this summer will represent the end of an era for a school rated “outstanding” by Ofsted inspectors.

Governors seem a little edgy and unsettled. “I’m trying not to think about it,” said one. Another simply winced.

“I know you have come to talk to me about my great age,” said Yvonne Hill, 61, the school’s headteacher who is retiring after 27 years, “but I am not going to sit around doing nothing, and, although it’s going to be very weird not being here, it’s probably time to go.”

Ms Hill – who has an MBE for services to education – talked about volunteering, classical music, keeping fit and also the prospect of long holidays in the south of France.

But while she is very much a fixture, the school’s student population is transient. More than 1,500 children, aged between 4 and 19, come and go each year. It is an unusual educational environment: at times chaotic with alarms  sounding, children and families coming and going – and a tube train carriage is lodged mysteriously in the courtyard. “Don’t ask,” said Ms Hill. 

Half a dozen children, from the psychological research department, are playing in the playground. But many of the school’s most poorly children cannot make it out of bed.

Ms Hill shows me a few spreadsheets and detailed information about the progress and problems associated with these “priority” students. One five-year-old cancer patient has made great strides in maths, but is struggling with subtracting. Their conditions range from cystic fibrosis and leukaemia, to psychological difficulties and severe infectious diseases. 

Ms Hill says: “Our priority is often to the dialysis patients. They are often in twice a week long-term. The key is to ensure their education is interrupted as little as possible.”

In the dialysis ward, one boy, hooked up to bleeping machines, shows me his presentation on urban foxes. A teenage girl with an infectious disease has tidied-up her decontamination room after hearing a young teaching trainee is coming.

“You’d be surprised how much a child still wants to engage with school, even when they are coping with high levels of trauma. It brings them a sense of normality,” says Ms Hill.

The teachers and assistants – who visit most of the kids at bedside – must take on board their special education needs. Many have hidden learning difficulties associated with their condition, such as depression or undiagnosed dyslexia.

“Over the years, the conditions here have got more and more complex and so has the teaching,” says Ms Hill.

The school has artists in residence and regular visits from performers and specialists in their field. A drama teacher is entertaining a group of young people in the children’s centre, built in 2009.

“A lot of these kids can’t go to the museum or the art gallery – so we bring it to them,” says Ms Hill.

“I have so much admiration for the nurses. It sounds corny, but it really has been a humbling experience and, of course, it puts your own problems in perspective.”

A new headteacher will be in place by September.