Evidence shows that young people living with long-term health conditions have difficult overall experiences in their school lives, including reduced attendance and academic attainment.

That’s why we’ve invested over £45,000 to support an important new strand of the INSCHOOL project, led by University of Leeds researchers based at the Leeds Institute of Health Science. The main INSCHOOL project is a 5-year NIHR (National Institute for Health and Care Research) funded programme of research looking into the school lives of young people with long-term physical health conditions.

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Read more: Leeds Children’s Hospital and University of Leeds launch £5 million research centre supported by charity

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Thanks to donations, we’re funding the INSCHOOL team to do a new project with parents and carers of the children and young people in the main study.

Over the past 18 months, the INSCHOOL team has directly interviewed young people with long-term health conditions to better understand what is important to them in their lives at school. The team would now like to interview parents and carers to investigate their experiences in liaising with schools and Leeds Children’s Hospital.

Dr Simon Pini, Senior Clinical Research Fellow overseeing the INSCHOOL project, said,

“There’s been some great progress with the project so far. The young people who have taken part in the qualitative project, and those who have helped us with the research, have all been amazing. As well as young people, we have had fantastic support from staff at Leeds Children’s Hospital and other professionals across the region to help make our research the best it can be. We will continue to work hard to use this collection of stories to influence policies to support young people with their school lives in the future.”

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Read more: CHORAL – Child Health Outcomes Research at Leeds

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Leeds Hospitals Charity has funded Dr Vicky Hopwood’s role as a new Research Fellow. Vicky will lead on the INSCHOOL Parent/Carer Project, which will provide a valuable addition to the findings from young people. As well as understanding the experiences of parents and carers, the results will also contribute to the creation of a new assessment tool designed to help to screen young people in clinics who may be having problems at school.

Dr Hopwood told us about the work she is doing and how she hopes this will benefit young people and their families,

“I am working on the new INSCHOOL Parent/Carer project where we will be talking to parents and guardians of young people who live with a long-term health condition about their experiences of school life. I’m excited to hear from parents and carers first-hand about what they think is working well and any challenges they face. I’m sure we can learn a lot from what they can tell us.”

 

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