Back to school - an exercise in social accountability for medical students

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So I'd like to tell you about our Back to School project, which is placing medical students into local primary schools in deprived areas. This was an exercise in social accountability, where we want future clinical practitioners to understand the social determinants of health, to take it into their future clinical practice.

How we did this was by placing the students into primary schools in deprived areas, where the aim was really for them to interact with the children and the teachers so they can understand the impact of deprivation and diversity on health and education. So they had to speak to the children, understand what they ate, understand about exercise, they delivered a teaching session and learned about safeguarding.

When we got the feedback it was really quite successful for the medical students. They learned about communication with children, they learned that you shouldn't speak to adults and the parents, they should speak to the child, and actually they also recognised children are not small adults. The teachers really appreciated the extra help and the input into their curriculum on a scientific basis, and the pupils themselves increased their aspirations. In fact the teacher said, when they fed back to us, that it improved the aspirations of all or over half of the pupils in their school.

So for us this was a really successful project, both for the medical students who began to consider a career in paediatrics earlier, for the teachers who got some help with delivering a scientific part of their curriculum, and for the pupils because it increased their aspirations. Manchester medical school are now going to incorporate a pilot into their curriculum so we can see how they develop, and what we're hoping is that this will be rolled out across all medical schools, because I think the importance of social accountability has been shown by our project.