Overview

According to the Ronald McDonald House Charities from Australia's EDMed (2009), 15% of kids until age 16 are sick in a way that doesn't allow them to carry on with their ordinary lives. Halfon et al. (2012) affirm that up to 30% of minors schooled in developed countries may be chronically ill.In Australia, a whole of about 950 kids and teenagers are diagnosed with cancer (leukaemia, lymphoma or brain/spinal cord tumours) every year; an 80% of them will be survivors (Ronald McDonald House Charities Australia, 2011). In fact, to many of those children who are chronically ill, the hospital is a second home. In opinion of Calf (1990), children who are absent from home schools for some time, find the fact of returning to them as very challenging in terms of educational, social, emotional and psychological readaptations. Among other things, that is because insignificant factors to adults can become a whole world in the minds of children. Thus, the service provided by Hospital Schools, that is to say, Schools located inside the Hospitals to service sick children during their periods of hospitalization, are heading to give the patients happy and positive memories of these situations as much as possible, as well as continuity of their academic backgrounds and schoolings.In addition, diverse physical abilities' kids (together with ill children) who become adults, often get sedentary jobs where the academic skills are highly required, so the educational programs during periods of chronic illness with their consequent recurrent hospital admissions are vital to help inserting them in the social contexts nowadays. With regards to the cultural factors, some western and non-western communities can even find that diverse physical abilities are shameful, a decay of masculinity or a curse for the kid. In these cases schools can also act as reducers of prejudices and cognitive bias.The analysis here presented -divided into several parts- is the result of two facts: the completion of a Ph. D. in Education focused on Hospital Schools in Spain, Sweden and Argentina, and also the completion of a postdoctoral research stay at the University of Sydney (Australia) by the end of the 2012 academic year.As we have concluded through the Ph. D. Thesis (Garc a, 2012), Hospital Schools do represent an insufficient number in the countries pre- and post-doctorally visited (Spain, Sweden, Argentina, South Africa, Australia, Germany, Italy and Japan) to respond the hospitalized children's needs, sometimes being just set up in a symbolical way that doesn't allow them to properly service every child in its individuality. The research that we now introduce follows an evaluative methodology, due to which we have based the project mostly on interviews to educational professionals from this track in New South Wales, along with documental analysis of Hospital Schools' reports and brochures as well as non-systematic observation.This research intends to protect and fight for the Human Right to Education by spreading the knowledge and understanding of the enormous and beautiful work that the Hospital Schools do everyday in every country. We don't aim here at pointing out whatever negative aspects of the schools, but at diffusing how important this education is for the children, for the hospitals and for all of us as human beings. We continue at claiming for the institutionalization of Hospital Schools not as symbolic spaces, but as proper schools inside hospitals (with resources similar to those from the schools outside), because where there is a child - there has to be a well-equipped and good quality school (UN, 1948; UN/ECOSOC, 1966; UNICEF, 1989; UNESCO-EFA, 2000).

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