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While children and young people are in the care of Sheffield Children’s, there is a wonderful and creative team of teachers ready to fulfil every child’s right to education. This world teachers’ day (5 October), we want to celebrate Chloe and Graham, two of the fantastic teachers who deliver specialist education to the children and young people staying with us.
Chloe and Graham work for Becton School, which is part of Nexus Multi-Academy Trust and works hand in hand with Sheffield Children’s NHS Foundation Trust. Teachers from Becton School teach across three sites; Sheffield Children’s Hospital, the Becton Centre, and Chapel House. Each setting has children and young people at different points in their journey of their care with Sheffield Children’s and lessons are planned individually with group activities to maintain the normalising feeling of being in school.
Sheffield Children’s is one of only three dedicated children’s hospital trusts in the UK and provides integrated healthcare for children and young people, including community and mental health care as well as acute and specialist services. The Becton Centre for Children and Young People is the Sheffield Children’s centre for children and young adults aged up to 18 with serious and complex mental health issues.
Chapel House is available if a child or young person is unable to attend school for a while because of a medical or mental health problem, the school, in consultation with parents and other professionals, seek an alternative way of maintaining their education.
Chloe works at both Sheffield Children’s Hospital and Becton Centre and has always worked in special education. She said: “It feels like quite a privilege to be able to work with the young people so closely to really get to know them to make your teaching really bespoke to what their interests are.”
The teaching team have access to classrooms across all sites, and they can also transform spaces on the ward in the into classrooms with bedside microscopes or portable ovens. They also organise activity days focusing on a specific subject such as science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) days that groups of children get involved with. Everything they do is bespoke to each young person, they catch up on what they have been doing at school, start new and interesting subjects and they learn their special interests – when a child loves Paw Patrol, they make sure lessons incorporate the characters as teaching tools for phonics or the alphabet!
Graham works at the Becton Centre and Chapel House and describes how his perspective changed to an individualised curriculum when he started at Becton School. “The focus is actually what does that student need right now? And it might be just something like they need to feel safe, or they need to feel distracted from what is going on in their life.
“Having that connection with a student that you knew was finding things really difficult. It’s awesome.”
Chloe and Graham celebrate all the successes of their students. The connection they have with the children and young people they work with means they can see the growth, learning and re-engagement happening in real time due to teaching one to one and in small groups. Each young person goes on a different journey – sometimes it happens easily and some others it may take more time.
Chloe describes a recent success with young people at the Becton Centre: “There are a couple of students that we have who were not engaged in school for years, who are now here on time for every lesson excited, engaging in all the activities and seeming to really, really enjoy it.”
Reflecting on his time at Becton, Graham recalls a heartwarming experience with a student from Emerald Lodge, a dedicated space for young people with serious mental illness who require specialist inpatient care. “They were really struggling, no communication with her really. All of a sudden one day, she was chatting away and asking me questions. That was probably my highlight just that little moment, it’s still been a struggle but having that connection with a student that you knew was finding things really difficult. It’s awesome.”
Chloe and Graham’s work has a huge impact, as well as all the teachers from Becton school. They are providing a service that is essential to the everyday experiences of the children and young people in our care. Thank you!
Happy World Teachers’ Day!
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