Vision
When Hythe House Support was founded in 2003, the aim was to establish an agency that would offer children and young people a professional, high-quality fostering service. However, it has developed into much more than that.
For many young people in care, attending mainstream school may not be the best option, or in some cases, even possible. Where education has been disrupted, or a great deal of school has been missed, Hythe House Education can provide the specialist intervention to get a child’s education back on track. This may be on a short-term basis until an appropriate mainstream provision is identified for the young person.
The private, independent school is based on the Isle of Sheppey, near Sittingbourne. Located opposite the beach, it provides a safe, enjoyable learning environment with very small class sizes and an ethos of supporting every child individually to reach their full potential.
Goal
The primary goal is to ensure that children are not only provided with care in a safe and homey environment but also that this is given by caregivers who really care about the task of fostering and most importantly about the children who are placed in their homes.
Hythe House School provides education for boys and girls aged between 11 and 16 years who may have experienced emotional, behavioural and social difficulties. They will be supported in the transition onto College, further education, apprenticeships or into full-time employment.
At a Glance
The school:
- Needed a simple solution to uncharged iPads.
- Needed an effective storage solution
Challenges
In the classroom, teachers use Apple iPad mini tablets as tools to support the students. However, in the beginning, this created some difficulties between students and classroom management.
Nicolette Duffy from Hythe House says, “We simply had a spare desk in the classroom to store the iPads, which were then connected to numerous power sockets. We found increasingly that the students didn’t remember to plug in their iPads at the end of the day.
“We found that those students that had not charged their own iPads would then try and take someone else’s. The tablets looked untidy and were subject to being moved and misplaced by other students.”
Deploying Devices
After seeing the CarryOn™ tablet and iPad Charging Station in an Educational IT magazine, Nicolette recognised the potential of the portable tablet charging station within the school environment. The CarryOn™ Charging Station offers efficient USB charging, and with up to 2.4 amps of power at each port, you can simultaneously charge five devices in the same amount of time as just one. The Charging Station allows you to carry five devices, together with all the charging hardware and cables in one neat and compact unit.
“The CarryOn™ tablet charging station is neat and tidy. All students have a labelled portal area and now know they only put their iPad in that portal. The iPads can also be safely locked away so that the students do not mess around with them either.”
And with the small footprint, the charging station can be stored almost anywhere, including being used as a portable device or fixed to a wall area with the bracket included.
Results to Date
“The charging station sits behinds the Headteacher’s desk at school where he teaches in the main classroom and this is its permanent home. I would definitely recommend the CarryOn™, and in fact, have done so to another school as they were having problems with students taking iPads home and forgetting to charge them. We have found that the CarryOn™ has made students much more organised.”
For more information about our charging stations, click here.