Futures [children's neurorehabilitation] education subproject

  • Research type

    Research Study

  • Full title

    Futures (Children’s Neuro-rehabilitation): Educational Data sub-project

  • IRAS ID

    159424

  • Contact name

    Rob Forsyth

  • Contact email

    rob.forsyth@newcastle.ac.uk

  • Sponsor organisation

    The Newcastle upon Tyne Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust

  • Research summary

    This is part of a broader project looking at how the NHS should provide services for children after brain injury. One common problem in this situation is that children can begin to struggle in school some years after injury, after discharge from hospital follow-up, leaving families feeling abandoned.

    This is a feasibility study aiming to see whether the information that schools routinely collect can be used to monitor for such late-developing problems. Data is routinely collected by schools on progress through National Curriculum Subjects and sent to a National Pupil Database (NPD) operated by the Department for Education. NPD database is anonymised: individual children are identified by a Unique Pupil Number (UPN) to allow their progress to be linked from one year’s data return to the next.

    This study seeks to study patterns of educational progress of children known to have sustained brain injury to see if blinded researchers can identify trajectories that could in future form the basis of “early warning” systems. This analysis will be carried out by researchers at the Department for Education at the University of Southampton. We will compare the impression they can glean from NPD information with the information we have on file regarding these children’s progress gathered in standard care advocating for them with educational authorities after their injuries.

    To identify children known to have sustained brain injuries in the NPD we need the UPNs of children known to the clinical services in Newcastle and Cambridge. We are seeking parental consent for schools to release these named children’s UPNs.

  • REC name

    London - Central Research Ethics Committee

  • REC reference

    14/LO/1665

  • Date of REC Opinion

    26 Sep 2014

  • REC opinion

    Further Information Favourable Opinion