Bristol schools slam plan to pay ‘exorbitant fees’ to hospital to teach sick children

Bristol governors have slammed plans to pay “exorbitant fees” to a hospital school to teach sick children. Each school would pay a daily fee for each pupil who is taught at the hospital, but there are concerns that these fees have been set too high.

Hundreds of pupils are taught at Bristol Hospital Education School, some children at Bristol Children’s Hospital and others at the Riverside Unit in Stapleton. But the service has struggled with its finances and Bristol City Council wants to help other schools.

From September, each school could pay a daily fee for each boarding student, for the duration of their stay. But there was confusion over exactly how much these fees would be during a schools forum meeting on Tuesday 4 June.

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Reena Bhogal-Welsh, the council’s director of education, said: “Bristol Hospital School of Education is introducing a nominal charge to support our most vulnerable young people with their needs. The proposal is to charge £35 per day for each pupil taught. It will be introduced at the beginning of the academic year.”

A report to the schools forum also put the charge at £35 a day for each pupil, which is more than normal schools receive in funding per child. One problem is that the costs paid by mainstream schools don’t disappear when a child is hospitalized, and the new fees will stretch tight budgets even further.

Merche Clark, governor at St John’s Primary School, said: “I don’t see where this money is coming from. The rate of £35 a day is almost one and a half times the money we get for our students. I personally find it quite difficult to contemplate. Your costs are not reduced because a child went to the hospital. At a time when we’re underfunding schools at many different levels, to make another cut is just a bit too much.”

Mandy Cheshire, a governor at St Bede’s Catholic College, added: “It is excessive I would suggest. Leave nothing behind for things like LSAs (learning support assistants) which we have put in place for some of these children while they are at Spital Education School. We will still have costs that we will not be able to cover.

“We’ll already have things in place for that child. If they’re gone for six weeks, we still have to pay for the support they would have had, because we can’t get rid of that support while they’re gone. Obviously, the school has things like electricity, which will not be reduced for that child.”

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However, the head of the hospital’s school of education denied the fee was a flat £35 a day. Philippa Scholar said the fees would actually be lower and would depend on how old the child was, but she added that she had not been able to send the suggested fees in time before the meeting.

She said: “We have introduced a sliding scale with these fees. £24.26 per day is suggested for primary schools, £30.37 for key stage three and £33.32 for key stage four. I didn’t have enough notice to take it out sooner or you would have known long before this meeting. What we ask is that the funding follows the child. If the child is with us for only six weeks, the school is only charged for that period.”

Ultimately, the new plan was not supported by headteachers and governors in the schools forum. Instead, a report with the correct figures for fees will be circulated before the forum’s next meeting in July. The hospital education school currently receives a fixed amount of funding from the council, which has not changed since 2012 – despite pupil numbers doubling and other costs rising.