You have to have the skills to deal with distraught parents sensitively. Sometimes teachers have to share classrooms and storage with other competing claimants. In small hospitals, or where the children are too ill to be moved, teaching goes on at the bedside. The satisfactions are many though, for hospital schools have a lot to offer children. Apart from the benefits of keeping up, as far as they are able, with their education, research shows that children get better much quicker if they are stimulated and happy.
School adds a degree of normality to lives which, often, have been tragically disrupted.
We want to turn what can be a very frightening experience into something positive. By law, local education authorities must make arrangements for the education of children who for reasons including illness may not for any period receive suitable education. There are about eight full-time teachers. The third hospital, Collingham Gardens Child and Adolescent Service, is a psychiatric residential unit for about 12 pupils, who stay on average about four months. Here most of the teachers have special qualification over and above several years' experience in mainstream.