''When I grow up I want to work with children and help make their lives better," so wrote the young Diana Spencer in a careers lesson when she was a pupil at West Heath.

It seemed more than just appropriate that the same school should serve this, her declared ambition after her death. Undoubtedly she would have approved.

As you may know, West Heath was the school at which Diana, later to become the Princess of Wales, spent what she described as the happiest days of her life. Coincidentally, the school was taken into Receivership the day after she and her friend Dodi Fayed were so tragically killed. Thanks to the generosity of Mohamed Al Fayed, it is a living memorial to them both.

West Heath has been a school since 1931 and then The New School opened in September 1998 when the Beth Marie Centre, an outstandingly successful Pupil Referral Unit, was re-located from its premises in the centre of Sevenoaks.

The New School has only one aim - to rebuild young damaged lives through education. In the great debates about our education system, there is a constituency of children who rarely get a mention: those who are so emotionally damaged that they cannot cope with mainstream schooling. These children, so emotionally scarred by abuse, bereavement, bullying or other trauma, are the forgotten ones of our system. But not at The New School at West Heath. Here, with great care, they are put back into education, the gateway to rebuilding their lives and their self-esteem.