Projects we fund

Overview

Due to improvements in diagnosis and treatment over recent decades, children who have cancer are more likely to survive. There are a growing number of children and adults who survived cancer in childhood. However, the experience of cancer and its treatment or complications, can mean that survivors of childhood cancer face barriers to learning and do not fulfil their potential in school. We need to know more about their quality of life during childhood and young adulthood, including their school experiences, in order to further improve their treatment and minimise disruption to education. We plan to use linked national administrative data from schools and hospitals for all children, together with cancer data to understand how a cancer diagnosis, its treatment and complications, affect participation in education and attainment at school  relationship with risk of relapse. 

Proposal

Information about school test results, absences and other information such as Special Educational Needs are routinely collected by schools, but are kept separately from high quality information on cancer diagnosis and treatment. In this study, we will use existing data from hospitals and schools using a database called ECHILD. We will bring this together with high quality information on cancer diagnosis and treatment. This process is called data linkage. The linkage will allow us to gain a better understanding of the changes in hospital contacts and school absences, attainment and Special Educational Needs provision, before, during and after cancer diagnosis, into adulthood. We will look at a range of childhood cancers, including leukaemia and brain cancer.

What difference will this project make?

By adding to the evidence on outcomes for childhood cancer survivors, this will enable us to make decisions about how best to support children with cancer. For example, this could mean increased support in school. 

Evidence about longer-term outcomes will also inform decisions about different treatment options. We will also enhance the ECHILD database with cancer registration data for childhood cancer so that many more questions can be answered by UK researchers.