Education Bill

Debate between Baroness Finlay of Llandaff and Lord Elton

Wednesday 13th July 2011 Grand Committee

[Baroness Finlay of Llandaff]

My Lords, I shall speak to my amendment in this group.

First, though, I shall address a small point just raised about relationships. In new Section 85B(1)(b), perhaps we should also insert, “bereavement reactions in grief and loss”. There are some fantastic programmes that help children prepare for the inevitability of experiencing bereavement, grief and loss, which are tailored for different ages. We know that by the time children leave school, 10 per cent of them are going to be seriously bereaved, but we are just ignoring that when we talk about other aspects of development. Those children do very badly if they do not understand their emotions.

My amendment is focused on community resuscitation. In the UK we have over 30,000 out-of-hospital cardiac arrests a year, and currently fewer than 10 per cent of victims survive to leave hospital. That means that we have 27,000 sudden deaths in the community. To put that in perspective, about 12,000 women a year die of breast cancer, 3,000 people die on the roads and 270 people die from knife crime. The number of sudden cardiac arrest deaths out there is huge. It takes around five to 10 minutes for an emergency ambulance to reach someone and for every minute that passes in cardiac arrest the chance of successful defibrillation decreases by 10 per cent, so time is of the essence. Immediately administrated cardiopulmonary resuscitation, which I am now going to call CPR because it is much shorter, will prolong the time that the patient remains shockable and therefore can be put back into a normal rhythm. It increases the chance of survival by a factor of around three. If there is a defibrillator nearby, survival rates of up to 50 per cent from a baseline of under 10 per cent have been reported.

Other parts of the world have already addressed this. It is part of the curriculum in Norway, Denmark and France. The American Heart Association has advised that no pupil should graduate from secondary school without being proficient in CPR, not just learning it. In Seattle, schools have taught CPR in PE lessons for over 30 years, so now half of the population of Seattle and the surrounding area are trained. In 2009 the survival rate for witnessed cardiac arrests was 46 per cent, while ours is under 10 per cent. The difference is dramatic.

Here in the UK, the British Heart Foundation has put Heartstart into over 2,700 schools, 700 of which are secondary schools or colleges. It trains thousands of children every year. British Red Cross and St John Ambulance also run training schemes, but the trouble is that the provision is patchy. There are 3.6 million children in secondary education in England, but only around 14 per cent have any training in CPR provided by one of these organisations. It is estimated that around 3 million secondary school pupils are not trained, even though the voluntary organisations are very ready to offer this training. By contrast, a poll taken by the British Heart Foundation at the beginning of this year found that 86 per cent of teachers, 70 per cent of parents and 78 per cent of children want to be trained. There is no resistance anywhere; it is a question of making the link. The campaign has wide medical, nursing and teaching support, as well as from the charities that deal with bereavement following cardiac death.

Training and support for teachers would enable them to deliver emergency life support. Currently, the British Heart Foundation spends around £800,000 a year on teaching resources, including mannequins, school packs, teacher supply cover and so on. It is estimated that it will be necessary to increase the provision of community resuscitation development officers, who are linked with the 12 ambulance trusts in England, by around five people to ensure that every child in every school is taught. With additional resources, the models could be successfully applied across all schools. There are over 3,000 local authority maintained secondary schools in England. The amendment aims to amend Section 84 of the Education Act 2002 so that this training becomes a community requirement at the first, second and third key stages.

I know that the Government can be much more prescriptive with the curriculum for maintained schools and I hope that they might consider adopting this training because that will influence the academies to take it up. However, I am well aware that the Government cannot be prescriptive for academies. Sadly, this is not part of PSHE at the moment. First aid training in the curriculum covers some parts of emergency life support but not emergency CPR, which is what can save lives. We could go from 27,000 sudden deaths in the community to approximately half that number if we spent a few hours on training all children in CPR. It has been estimated that the training takes only around four hours. It would mean that when they come across someone who has collapsed and is effectively dead on the street, they will know what to do.

[Lord Elton]

My Lords, I know that there are quite a number of people who, like me, should declare an interest in this, having been identified as a potential victim. I shall just tell my noble friend that he will have to argue very strongly against this amendment to stop me supporting it at a later stage.