Health records should protect the child, not fill a cupboard

On sports day at a school in Bhopal, a parent volunteer hands out laddoos at the finish line. A Class 4 girl with a severe peanut allergy takes one. Her allergy is written on the admission form she filled in three years ago, which sits in a steel cupboard in the office. Her class teacher is new and has never seen it. The nurse is at the other end of the ground, and the emergency number in the file belongs to a phone her father no longer uses. She is fine — a sharp-eyed friend stops her — but the principal spends that evening realising that the school's health records exist mainly to be inspected. Two months earlier, a check-up camp had flagged 40 children for eye tests. Nobody knows how many went.

The claim of this guide is simple: a student health record is only useful if the right person can find the right fact in a minute, and if someone follows up on what it says. Filing a check-up form satisfies an inspector. Protecting a child needs three things the filing cabinet cannot give: the emergency facts in the class teacher's hand, a record the nurse can update in real time, and a follow-up on every referral — with strict limits on who sees the rest.

What the rules require of schools

For CBSE schools, the baseline is written into the affiliation bye-laws: clause 14.6 of the 2018 bye-laws says the school shall arrange a medical check-up of its students at least once every year and keep a proper record of it. CBSE's circular of 25 July 2018 on mainstreaming health and physical education went further for senior classes: one period of health and physical education every day for Classes 9 to 12, a prescribed Health and Activity Card for recording it, and a report of that work to be uploaded when the school registers its Class 10 and 12 students for the board exams. The same circular says individual data stays with the school, and that protecting its privacy is the school's responsibility. Around these rules sit several national health programmes that schools meet in practice:

The CBSE Health and Activity Card, section by section

The card attached to CBSE's 2018 circular is the closest thing to a national format for school health records, and many non-CBSE schools use it as a template. It has four parts. Knowing them helps a school decide what to collect at admission and what to measure at each check-up, rather than inventing a form every year.

• General information: the student's name, admission number, date of birth, gender and blood group; the parents' names, with optional details such as height, weight and blood group; address, phone and whether the child has special needs. The circular marks the optional fields as information that need not be shared with CBSE.
• Health record, Classes 9 to 12: vision for each eye, ears, teeth (occlusion, caries, tonsils and gums), height, weight, hip and waist circumference, pulse, blood pressure, and a posture check covering problems such as round shoulders, scoliosis, flat feet, knock knees and bow legs.
• Activity record: one sporting activity (athletics or swimming, a team game, an individual game or adventure sports), a health-and-fitness activity such as mass PT, yoga, dance or jogging, and SEWA, the community service strand.
• Fitness tests: BMI, partial curl-up, flexed or bent arm hang, sit and reach, 600 metre run, flamingo balance, shuttle run, sprint, standing vertical jump, plate tapping and the alternate hand wall toss, with instructions in CBSE's HPE manual.

What a school health record should hold for every child

The CBSE card describes what to measure. It does not describe what a school needs to keep a child safe on an ordinary Tuesday. That list is shorter and more urgent, and it should be confirmed by parents at admission and again at the start of every session:

Who should see what

Health information is the most sensitive data a school holds about a child, and the CBSE circular puts its privacy squarely on the school. The practical answer is tiers, not trust. A class teacher needs the emergency view — blood group, critical allergies and conditions, and the emergency number — on the class list, and nothing else. The nurse or medical officer and the principal need the full record. A PE teacher or hostel warden may need specific parts. Parents should see their own child's record and nobody else's. Every time someone opens a full record, the school should know who it was. And under the DPDP Act, 2023, the purpose for which a parent gave the information limits how the school may use it: health data collected for emergencies is not data for a marketing brochure or a merit list.

How to run the annual check-up so it leads somewhere

Most schools hold the check-up. Far fewer finish it. These steps turn a two-day camp into a record that helps children:

1. Schedule by class and tell parents in advance. Share the date, what will be checked and who the doctor is, so families can send reports and ask questions.
2. Record straight into each child's record. Loose forms get filed and forgotten; entries against the child's record can be compared year on year.
3. Measure what matters for the age. Vision, ears, teeth, height, weight and BMI for everyone; posture, pulse and blood pressure for older students; haemoglobin where a doctor tests it.
4. Flag every referral clearly. A child sent for an eye test should appear on a list, not in a footnote.
5. Tell parents the result within the week. Normal results reassure; referrals need to reach the family while the camp is still fresh.
6. Follow up referrals within 30 days. Ask for the specialist's note, record the outcome and close the referral.
7. Look at growth, not a single reading. A child's height and weight across three years say more than one number.
8. Give the principal three figures. Coverage (how many were checked), referrals raised, and referrals still open.

The options you will run into

Many schools still keep paper cards and an Excel sheet, which satisfies an inspection and fails in an emergency. Some tie up with a local hospital that runs the annual camp and hands back a printed report. School ERPs you will meet — Entab, Edunext, Fedena, Teachmint and others — usually hold basic medical details in the student profile. When you compare them, look past that tab. Ask whether the software handles check-up camps with referrals and follow-up, immunisation due dates, a sick-room log with parent alerts, the government programme registers your school runs, the CBSE card, and different access for teachers and nurses.

Where Inkwelly fits

Inkwelly's Health & Fitness module keeps one health record per child alongside the student profile: blood group, allergies with their severity and a critical flag, long-term conditions, medicines with dose and schedule, emergency contacts, family doctor, insurance, parental consents and special needs. Check-ups can be entered child by child or camp-style for a whole class, recording height, weight, BMI worked out automatically, blood pressure, pulse, vision, colour vision, ears, teeth, posture, haemoglobin and referrals, and results are published to parents. The Health and Activity Card prints as a PDF for any child, carrying the health record across the years.

The school keeps its own vaccine list and sees which doses are due or overdue, and parents are reminded about doses due within a week. Every sick-room visit is logged, and parents are alerted when a child is sent home, referred or admitted to hospital — the alert gives the date and outcome, never the symptoms. Schools that run WIFS, deworming rounds, RBSK screening or wellness sessions get registers and reports for each. Class teachers see only the emergency view; the nurse and principal see the full record, and every full-record view is logged. Parents see their own child's health summary, growth and immunisations in the app, in English or Hindi. The module is part of the Premium plan and is switched on school by school. For the privacy side, read our guide to the DPDP Act for schools.

“A health record earns its keep on the one afternoon a child cannot speak for themselves.”

Start with the emergency view

You do not need to digitise everything by next month. Start with the part that protects children tomorrow: for every class, a current list of blood groups, critical allergies and conditions, and working emergency numbers, in the class teacher's hands. Then fix the check-up: record it against each child, and close every referral within 30 days. Once those two work, add the CBSE card for Classes 9 to 12 before the board registration window, and the immunisation record. A school that does these four things has health records that do their job.

See a health record, a check-up camp and the CBSE card

A 20-minute walkthrough: a child's health profile, a class check-up with referrals, the teacher's emergency view and the Health and Activity Card PDF.