by Tim Greenfield

A hi-tech trial currently taking place at Fullerton House School is making distances of hundreds of miles between students and their families disappear - at the touch of a button.

With youngsters living at the South Yorkshire school from as far apart as Brighton, Ipswich, London and Stockport, this new technology is highly beneficial to parents who cannot make frequent long distance journeys to the school and helps enormously when students are non-verbal.

Two families have been chosen by the Hesley Group to take part in the trial, which lets them enjoy face-to-face contact with their children every week via an ISDN line sending pictures and sound to a special phone installed in their homes.

John and Helen Murfin, whose son John has been at Fullerton for over three years, say the trial has been a great success, supplementing their visits and enabling them to maintain better contact with John, who is non-verbal.

“It is proper two-way communication, you can see what he is doing and his reactions, which is great,” says Mr Murfin. “The video phone has not stopped our visits - it is an extra bonus. It is just so good being able to see him during phone calls. Before, we would talk to his key worker on the phone, and John was totally missed out. Now he is in the link.” The video-phone has provided much better contact with their son between their visits to Fullerton, which mean a six-hour round trip for the family.

Each week at a pre-arranged time, Nathan Waterman - who is the other trialist using the phone to keep in touch with his mother, Nicola, in Kent - and John sit in front of a TV at Fullerton and ‘meet’ their families. Their image is beamed by a camera under the TV to their parents, who have a smaller screen on a phone and the students can see their relatives on the larger TV screen in front of them.

“John goes up to the camera and we get nice smiles,” said Mr Murfin. “A call might last ten minutes. At the beginning he will be quite happy to look at us and you can see he is happy. Then he will sit down while we find out from his key worker what he has been doing - but you can see he is still listening as his face lights up.” Mr Murfin adds that the system has helped their other son, David, 13, see how brother John is getting on.

Fullerton House head David O’Connor believes the video-phone will eventually become an established part of the service offered by care establishments. He says the video-phone is especially useful for students who have little or no verbal communication skills. Although some can use the telephone or send symbol-based letters, the new technology really does bring the students and their families together.

At present the service is being provided to the families by the Hesley Group, but David believes it could be funded by local authorities or via the student’s Disability Allowance. “There is already funding for maintaining family contact, and I think eventually local authorities will offer it.” David also thinks that the mobility part of the Disability Allowance could be used to finance the phones, which cost around £800 to buy and £400 a year for installation and rental of the ISDN line.