Educational Outcomes after Paediatric Brain Injuries & the Role of Special Educational Needs Support

The Time for Change report highlighted that ABI is chronically under-recognised and poorly understood in education settings. ABI is also not currently a Special Educational Needs (SEN) category, meaning that we have very poor data on the kind of support children with ABI receive when transitioning back to school after injury, and what their outcomes are in education. 

This is an 18-month project, funded by ADR-UK in partnership with UKABIF. We will examine ECHILD data to answer our research questions. ECHILD (Educational and Child Health Insights from Linked Data) is an administrative data linkage connecting hospital data with the National Pupil Database. We are requesting data for a birth cohort of all children born between 1^st September 2003 and 31^st August 2004, who attended school in England.

The researchers have requested the following datasets:

Health: A&E (and ECDS), Admitted Patient Care
Social Care: Children Looked After and Children In Need Census
Education: Early Years, KS1, KS2, KS4, Absences, Exclusions, School Census, PRU and AP

These data will be used to answer the following questions:

1.     How many children present at hospital with an injury or illness indicative of ABI?
How does the prevalence of ABI vary across socio-demographic profiles?

2.     What SEN provision do children with ABI receive, and which SEN categories are they classified under? Does SEN provision vary based on geography and/or socio-demographic characteristics?

3.     Does having an ABI make a child more vulnerable to school absence, exclusion, or poorer educational attainment compared to peers with no ABI, or peers with orthopaedic injuries? What injury characteristics impact these trajectories?

4.     How does SEN support moderate the impact of ABI on educational outcomes?

Dr Hope Kent is the Research Fellow leading on the project, based at the University of Exeter. Professor Nathan Hughes (University of Sheffield), Professor Huw Williams (University of Exeter), and Professor George Leckie (University of Bristol) are mentors on the project. 

The work is funded by ADR-UK (co-funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, and the Medical Research Council).