Education: Citizenship

Lord Aberdare Excerpts

Thursday 27th June 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Aberdare]

My Lords, I spoke in April in a short debate on personal, social and health education—PSHE— in schools, arguing that first aid and emergency life-saving skills should be made mandatory in schools, possibly as an element of the PSHE curriculum. So my case today essentially boils down to, “If not PSHE, why not citizenship?”. The citizenship curriculum would be at least as appropriate a home for emergency first aid training. The Department for Education’s draft programmes of study for citizenship at key stages 3 and 4, included in the Library’s helpful briefing pack, are intended,

“to provide pupils with knowledge, skills and understanding to prepare them to play a full and active part in society”

and include the aim of developing,

“an interest in, and commitment to, volunteering that they will take with them into adulthood”.

What greater,

“contribution to the improvement of their community”

could there be than developing practical skills to help fellow citizens in emergency situations, even to the extent of saving their lives?

I declare an interest as a trustee of St John Cymru-Wales, the leading first aid, youth and volunteering charity in Wales. I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, on obtaining this debate and introducing it with his characteristic eloquence and persuasiveness.

My case for mandatory first aid training in schools is, like Gaul, in three parts: first, there is a real need for it; secondly, it works; and, thirdly, it is eminently doable. Every year in the UK, up to 140,000 people die in situations where first aid might have given them a chance to live. Some 60,000 people suffer cardiac arrests outside hospital, two-thirds at home and the other third in a public setting. Almost half of those which occur in public are witnessed by other people, quite often children. With every minute that passes, the chances of survival decrease by about 10%, so it can be literally a matter of life and death whether there is someone on the scene trained in the necessary skills; for example, to get the person into the recovery position, or to provide CPR, or to control bleeding, at least until professional help can arrive. That is why there is a need for first aid training.

There is also clear evidence that it works. Such training is already compulsory in many countries, including Norway, Denmark, France and 36 US states. The survival rate in Norway from shockable cardiac arrest is 52%; in the UK it varies between 2% and 12% depending on where the heart attack occurs. In Seattle, where 50% of the population is trained in emergency lifesaving, the survival rate is two and a half times ours.

It makes sense to teach these skills in schools. The basic training can take as little as two hours, and several organisations offer well designed teaching packages to deliver it, including the British Heart Foundation—BHF—and the Red Cross, as well as St John itself. St John Cymru-Wales’s Young Lifesaver scheme offers training covering 11 different aspects of first aid, including choking, asthma, bleeding, fractures, burns, poisoning, heart attacks and others. The whole course takes about eight hours, and is offered at both primary and secondary school levels, from age seven upwards. There are numerous examples of young people putting their skills into practice to save lives. The BHF estimates the annual cost of offering such training as no more than about £2,200 per school, or even less after the first year.

The argument for making training mandatory in schools rests principally on the lives that could be saved as a result, but there are other valuable benefits to be gained. Students enjoy and value their training. A review of BHF’s Heartstart programme in Northern Ireland found that 98% of students had enjoyed it, and 68% had shared their learning with family and friends. It provides a pathway towards continued volunteering. Emergency life-saving can provide a first step for young people to go on to volunteer roles, such as becoming community responders later on.

Teachers report improved confidence among students receiving first aid training. A typical quote from a teacher is:

“They have gained in confidence and are certainly a better team, as well as having vital knowledge. This is their favourite aspect of the citizenship course, as it is practically based and obviously progressive. They also talk to their parents about the scenarios”.

There is a real need to teach first aid in schools. It would produce significant results and it is realistically achievable. Although I share the view frequently stated by the Minister that schools should have as much control as possible over their own curriculum, in the case of first aid skills this is not working. Only 13% of students leave school with any life-saving training, even though a BHF survey in 2011 found that 78% of children want it, as do 86% of teachers and 70% of parents. I certainly had no such training at school, but I have now remedied this by completing just this week the training programme organised by the All-Party Parliamentary Group on First Aid, of which I confess to being an officer and recommend to any of your Lordships who may be interested, in partnership with St John Ambulance.

We should ensure that our younger citizens acquire these skills as a matter of course at school. I urge the Minister to look at how to make this happen and to recognise that the citizenship programme would be a good place—if not necessarily the only place—to include it, but as a mandatory element.

I should like to add a brief post-script. I received this morning, as, evidently, did the noble Lord, Lord Storey, a briefing from the Cabinet Office about the campaign for youth social action which is being launched today by the Prince of Wales and which was based on work done by Dame Julia Cleverdon and Amanda Jordan. This has strong cross-party support and aims to increase volunteering by 10 to 20 year-olds from 29% to 50% by 2020. Trial programmes will be funded in four areas from October. From my own experience of running social action programmes with schools in Southwark some years ago, I believe that this is a splendid initiative deserving of strong support, especially, of course, if community and school first-aid programmes are among those funded.

Education: Personal, Social and Health Education

Lord Aberdare Excerpts

Wednesday 24th April 2013 Grand Committee

[Lord Aberdare]

My Lords, I shall address just one topic; the need for first aid and life-saving skills to be a mandatory part of the curriculum, ideally as an element of PSHE. I hope to do so without repeating too many of the excellent points made by my noble friend Lady Masham of Ilton. In doing so, I declare my interest as a trustee of St John Cymru Wales, the leading first aid, youth and volunteering charity in Wales.

Every year in the UK, some 60,000 people suffer cardiac arrests outside hospital; two-thirds at home, and the other third in a public setting. With every minute that passes their chances of survival decrease by about 10%. Therefore, whether there is someone on the scene trained in the necessary skills, such as providing CPR or to use a defibrillator if available, can be a matter of life and death. By the way, nearly half of the cardiac arrests that occur in public are witnessed by bystanders who are not infrequently children.

There is clear evidence that first aid training works. It is already compulsory in many countries including Norway, Denmark, France and 36 US states, and 80% of residents in Scandinavia and Germany have first aid skills. The survival rate in Norway from shockable cardiac arrests is 52%; in the UK it varies from between 2% and 12% depending on where you are unlucky or lucky enough to be. In Seattle, where 50% of the population are trained in emergency life saving, the survival rate is two and a half times ours.

These are not difficult skills to acquire and the basic training can take as little as two hours. Several organisations offer well designed teaching packages to deliver it, including the British Heart Foundation and the Red Cross, as well as St John itself. I have been on two training courses here at Westminster; one run by the All-Party Parliamentary Group on First Aid, on which I serve along with my noble friend, and the other by the Parliament Safety, Health and Wellbeing service. Luckily, nobody has yet had to depend on my skills, and I hope that they will not have to.

St John Cymru Wales’s young life saver scheme offers training covering 11 different aspects of first aid, from initial assessment to getting the patient into the recovery position, and dealing with issues such as choking, asthma, bleeding, fractures, burns, poisoning and heart attacks, as well as giving CPR. The whole course takes seven to eight hours and is offered at both primary and secondary school levels from age seven upwards.

Since 2005 about 20,000 children have been taught basic first aid by St John in Wales, and there are a growing number of stories of young people successfully applying their skills to save lives, often of a parent, sibling or school friend. In getting myself briefed for this debate, I have been inundated with examples. For instance, a 10 year-old schoolboy at Abercarn primary school, Elliot Dunn, saved his mother from choking on a hazelnut using the technique he had learnt at school.

The British Heart Foundation estimates the cost of offering such training as no more than about £2,200 per school. Not only are these valuable skills to possess, but they are fun to learn, highly practical and can enhance children’s sense of self-worth. A BHF survey in 2011 found that 86% of teachers felt that emergency life saving should be in the curriculum, as did 70% of parents, and 78% of children wanted to be taught it. I am sympathetic to the Government’s desire to give schools as much freedom as possible to determine the details of their own curriculum. However, in relation to first aid skills, and despite what teachers, parents and students want, this approach just is not working. Only 13% of young people leave school with any life saving training, which is less than one in seven.

First aid and emergency life saving skills should be an essential part of

“pupils’ skills and knowledge relevant to growing up in the United Kingdom”,

as stated in today’s Motion. Despite good intentions all round, not nearly enough schools are teaching these skills. We should aim to be up with the field, not lagging behind in giving our students the skills to prevent their fellow citizens losing their lives when they could be saved by prompt and effective first aid.

Schools: Classics

Lord Aberdare Excerpts

Tuesday 6th November 2012 Grand Committee

Asked By

[Lord Aberdare]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what steps they will take to promote the teaching of classics in schools.

[Lord Aberdare]

My Lords, I did think briefly of making my opening remarks in Latin, but I desisted for two reasons. First, as a distinctly lapsed classicist—despite having studied Latin for at least 15 years and Greek for over 10—I am ashamed to say that my Latin would no longer be up to the task. Secondly, addressing your Lordships as “O Senatores” might take this debate into areas beyond its proper boundaries.

I sought this debate because I myself have benefitted enormously from the opportunities I had to study classics, which I take to include Latin, Greek, ancient history and classical civilisation. I would like to extend such opportunities much more widely. In preparing for the debate, I have been greatly helped by briefing materials provided by Peter Jones, that princeps or primus inter pares of classicists. I nearly said éminence grise, which would have been inappropriate. He is a leading light of the charities Classics for All and Friends of Classics; some of your Lordships might be familiar with his Ancient and Modern column in the Spectator. I was also helped by the excellent briefing pack put together at short notice by Venetia Thompson of the House of Lords Library. I am grateful to noble Lords who plan to speak and much look forward to hearing what they say. I thank them for their patience in coping with the unpredictable timing of business in this place.

I will seek to make three points: that classics is important; that it should be offered in more, preferably most, schools; and that Government should actively support that aim, including by providing for appropriate qualifications and examinations systems and ensuring an adequate supply of trained teachers.

First, to adapt the old Guinness ad, “Classics is good for you”. Surely there can be no other subject area offering such a breadth of learning opportunity and interest encompassing language, literature, history, philosophy, art, technology, culture and others. Latin and Greek are not only helpful in learning languages in general; they can be invaluable aids to improving grammar and vocabulary in our own language, English. Some 60% of English words are estimated to have Greek or Latin roots. In the vocabulary of the sciences, that figure rises to over 90%. As highly inflected languages, with all those conjugations, declensions, cases, tenses, moods, voices and so on—never forgetting the ablative absolute—Latin and Greek are invaluable routes to learning intellectual discipline and logic. My own former skills—in debugging complex programming code as a systems analyst at IBM—owed much to my training in classical languages. The chairman of IBM UK in my later years there, Sir Anthony Cleaver, was himself a classicist.

One only has to list some of those who have gone on from studying classics to distinguished careers to recognise the breadth of opportunities it can open: Mary Beard, Colin Dexter, Stephen Fry, Ian Hislop, JK Rowling, Tom Stoppard, Fay Weldon, and PG Wodehouse. In your Lordships' House—indeed, in this very room in some cases—we have the noble Lord, Lord Butler of Brockwell, the noble Baroness, Lady Greenfield, the noble Lord, Lord Waldegrave of North Hill, the noble Baroness, Lady Warnock, and others. Last year, London was fortunate enough to have both a mayor and a lord mayor who were classicists.

In 2011, Friends of Classics conducted a survey of almost 2,200 people who had studied classics. Well over 80% of them supported classics being taught in schools; over half saw classics as useful or very useful for their own area of work—for example by enhancing language skills, breadth of understanding, and thinking and reasoning skills. Sixty-eight per cent of them thought that studying classics had helped them personally. Perhaps most striking of all, no less than 81% believed their own quality of life had benefited—a view which I wholly endorse.

Secondly, classics is good for schools. Currently, about 70% of independent schools teach classics, but only about 25% of state schools—in many cases mainly to their more talented students. State schools often face problems of timetabling classics lessons and finding staff able or willing to teach it. Despite that, three-quarters of state school classics teachers would like to increase the numbers studying classics and 47% of state schools without any classics teaching would try introducing classics subjects if offered small grants to do so—of the order of £5,000 over three years. The number of state schools which have started Latin in the past 10 years, using the Cambridge Schools Classics Project e-Latin initiative, is over 500.

Burntwood School for Girls in Tooting, despite specialising in science, not only offers Latin to its students, but last year added Ancient Greek as an extended curriculum offering in years 9 and 10. Some 250 girls are doing Latin and 30 girls have now started working towards a GCSE in Greek. This has been achieved largely through the appointment of a single classics teacher, Sarah Brack, and in a school where some 60 languages are spoken at home and 20% of students are eligible for free school meals. Yet its exam performance puts it in the top 10% of non-selective schools in England.

If more schools like Burntwood are to start teaching classics, they need to be confident that appropriate qualifications and examination systems are in place to support them. I congratulate the Government on the fact that Latin, Greek and ancient history are all included in the English baccalaureate, although the number of boards offering them is small. On the GCSE front, the withdrawal of AQA's Latin GCSE exams in 2006 led to a fall in the number of candidates nationally. However, the introduction of a new Latin exam by the Welsh Joint Education Committee in 2010, despite not having full GCSE status, resulted in a significant increase in candidates, from 8,500 to 12,000.

The Government plan to move to a system with only one examination board for any subject. This could present a real challenge for specialist subjects like classics, where there is a wide variation in the needs and attainments of students: for example, between those who study Latin for GCSE for up to 500 hours at independent schools with a long tradition of teaching classics, and those who have no more than 120-140 hours of teaching at a state school new to the subject. If there is to be only one board, the Government should ensure that it can offer examinations with the flexibility to cater for these different needs, without loss of rigour.

Finally, the most crucial factor in successfully teaching classics, as with other subjects, is the quality of the teachers themselves. There must be an adequate supply of properly-trained classics teachers. At present, there is a net loss of something between six and 26 specialist trained classics teachers every year, despite the interest of schools, parents, students and others in increasing the numbers studying the subject.

The various bodies dedicated to promoting classics teaching are actively working on alternative ways of addressing this challenge. For example, they are looking at developing “bolt-on” classical modules for PGCEs, so that someone studying to teach modern languages or history would also receive a month or so of classics training to offer schools employing them the basic skills needed to try out classical subjects. For teachers already in schools, mentoring and support services could be offered to enable them to start classics courses.

Initiatives like these cost money, and the classics bodies have a strong record of coming up with funds to support their subjects. But the Government could help to achieve a great deal more, and to bring the benefits of classics teaching to a much wider range of state students. They might offer small grants to encourage schools to take the first steps into classics teaching: perhaps a few thousand pounds, possibly in the form of matched funding for money raised by the schools themselves. They should ensure that there are suitable exams in place to recognise the achievements of schools and their students in classics subjects; and they must take steps to halt the current downward trend of qualified classics teachers. I look forward to hearing the suggestions of other noble Lords on how the Government could help.

Noble Lords may recall Winston Churchill's statement that,

“I would make them all”—

that is school children, and I am afraid I cannot do Sir Winston’s voice—

“learn English: and then I would let the clever ones learn Latin as an honour, and Greek as a treat”.

I would argue that he was wrong. I prefer to end with a 19th century quote from the Reverend Thomas Gaisford, Dean of Christ Church, Oxford, my own former college:

“Nor can I do better, in conclusion, than impress upon you the study of Greek literature, which not only elevates above the vulgar herd but leads not infrequently to positions of considerable emolument”.

I strongly endorse his recommendation, and would add that even without the considerable emolument, which I regret I have failed to attain, classics teaching offers incalculable benefits not just to those lucky enough to receive it, but to the wider communities in which they live and indeed to the UK as a whole. For that reason the Government should do all that they can to promote, extend and support it.