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Revised School Medical Record Card - Form 10M
These new forms were brought into use at the beginning of the year.
Notes of guidance on the revised school medical record card approved by the Minister for
the purposes of Regulation 10(3) of the School Health Services and Handicapped Pupils Regulations,
1953, were sent to local authorities in time for the commencement of work at the beginning of
1956.
When a child is examined for the first time the new form is used; in the case of
existing cards appropriate slips have been inserted in them. When stocks of the earlier
approved forms are exhausted then the new cards will be in general use.
The chief object of the revised school medical record card is to furnish a continuous
record of events of medical importance in the child's life from the date of entrance to
school until the time of leaving, and to provide some indication of the state of health of
schoolchildren generally. It is pointed out by the Ministry that there should be sufficient
uniformity in methods of recording to make the main record valuable when the child moves
from one district to another. The main record card is kept in the central office of the
school health service. It is a confidential document.
Welfare of Schoolchildren.
The School Health Service is the oldest statutory personal health service in the
country - a fact perhaps not too well known - and It owed its formation largely to the
report of the Inter-Departmental Committee on Physical Deterioration in 1904. This Committee
was set up as a result of national apprehension at the physical state of the recruits during
the Boer war and it identified the appalling defects in conditions bearing on the physical
and moral welfare of children and young persons and decided that these were the most important
factors in the alleged physical deterioration of the nation, and that long-term policy of
child welfare was urgently required. It was the Education (Administrative Provisions) Act of
1907 which first provided the statutory basis for our School Health Service.
Since that time the service has steadily developed, with West Ham to the fore in many
fields. The forthcoming Jubilee is a time when it is specially appropriate that we should
look back, and I am sure that the reports of those earlier days would contain much of interest
to our generation and would give scope for comparing the present with conditions existing here
in those pioneering days. The Chief Medical Officer of the Ministry of Education, Sir John
Charles, refers to the "foundations which were then so well and truly laid."
The School Health Service has been developed to meet the special circumstances attending
the life of the school child, and from the earliest days the attitude of the school doctor has
been essentially that of a practitioner of social medicine. The present function of the
service is "that of discovering the first signs of failure of physiological adaptation which
precedes the stage of pathological lesion, and this pre-supposes a greater familiarity with
what constitutes normality, which is recognised not as a point in a scale but as a range."
This point has been stressed by our paediatrician, Dr. Hinden, in one of his reports.
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