Providing Free Digital Education To Children in The Underfunded NHS

Distraction, peer-support, and most importantly – engaging play and recreation – are key to making sure children who are hospitalised have the least negative experience possible with their unfortunate hospital stays.

Many young children, or young adults, who are suffering medium-to-long term illness and ailments that require a prolonged hospital stay, find the whole thing uncomfortable, challenging, and distressing. Hospitals are anxious places for all involved (I know this myself as a mother of young children). Children will naturally express themselves via anxious, crying, shouting, or physically resisting behaviour. However, a key way in mitigating distress for children in hospitals, is to engage them in meaningful distraction and play.

So, especially when children feel isolated from their school and class friends, it is imperative that our healthcare settings, predominantly, the NHS have the resources available to them to engage children in positive play and education. Even light academic and socially-engaging educational activities, help reducing the difficulties for children in hospitals, and aid in creating distraction, as sense of worth, and create enjoyment for children and young adults undergoing mental and physical ordeal.

Hospital funding in the UK and under-resourced hospitals across the nation make frequent headlines, so I wont labour the point, but as edtech and e-learning providers where possible, can help the NHS provide children who are hospitalised with engaging digital education resources. An engaging and genuinely interesting online course in space, animals, or languages (costing their parents no money) could be the difference to that little boy or little girl

That is what we have been doing at Centre of Excellence.

Partnering with NHS Trusts for Free Online Children Courses – Centre of Excellence

In the last month Centre of Excellence have partnered with 4 NHS Hospitals to give free courses to the kids whilst they are poorly in the hospital. We have recently teamed up with 3 NHS trusts, including Bolton Royal Hospital, Royal Oldham Hospital, and Tameside Hospital, to give all the children in their hospitals free access to our e-learning courses for kids.

These children based in these hospitals children’s wards now having the opportunity to learn about dinosaurs and famous world explorers (light-hearted but educational) via our courses, whilst also having the option to access our e-learning courses that are aligned to school curriculum subjects to ensure they keep up with schooling themes. This is important, especially for ensuring children remain a healthy long term relationship with learning and school if they are in and out of hospital.

Centre of Excellence are trying to partner with as many hospitals as possible to offer children free online learning courses in subjects such as wellbeing, science, languages, nutrition, literacy, numeracy, history and geography. Children having the opportunity to learn for free during their hospital stay, especially in truly engaging realms of creative writing, history, and space, is paramount to a more comfortable and bearable experience (and the way hospitals can positively impact children undergoing trauma by giving them scope for enjoyable personal development).

Our Mission

With Centre of Excellence for Kids, we provide a full range of engaging and in-depth online courses:

• Y2 – Year 6 Subjects for English and Maths Courses
• Creative Writing for Kids
• Beginners for French
• Chemistry for Kids
• Biology for Kids
• History for Kids
• Outer Space
• Dinosaurs

At Centre of Excellence, our mission as a company is to positively impact the lives of a billion people worldwide which is a huge mission for online education. So many people worldwide are suffering and not able to access education, especially children. At Centre of Excellence our aim is to support charities with free education as much as we possibly can. We’ve created a wide range of kids courses making learning fun and giving them the ability to learn new skills in and outside of the classroom!