Compulsory Emergency First Aid Education (State-funded Secondary Schools) Bill

Debate between Anne-Marie Trevelyan and Philip Davies

Friday 20th November 2015 Commons Chamber

[Philip Davies]

I will plough on with my remarks, Mr Deputy Speaker; such matters are outside my control. If 100 Members are here we will have a vote come what may, whatever I say or do.

There are the costs of the venue hire, training the teachers and training the replacement teachers—this is according to the British Heart Foundation, which goes on to say:

“The largest consumable cost is the initial supply of resuscitation manikins.”

We have not heard about this in the debate so far. The BHF goes on:

“Ideally, in a class of up to 32 there should be one manikin used between two people (16 in total). Schools should have both standard resuscitation manikins and baby manikins. These are one-off costs for the lifetime of the manikin, with annual costs to maintain the equipment. Per school, we estimate that this costs around £2,200 each year. This takes into account the appropriate learning materials required in a programme to aid teaching these life-saving skills to pupils, in addition to general administration and monitoring costs.”

That opens up a whole can of worms: schools will have to find supply teachers—an immense cost—so that teachers can go on a course for a day to learn the first aid information to teach. Even if the teachers do not go on the course themselves, they still need to find time to be taught the first aid information by other teachers. Furthermore, there is the cost of the manikins, mentioned by the British Heart Foundation, as well.

Earlier, I was discussing the problems that schools have. One problem cited by Ofsted is teacher turnover. Continually being required to send new teachers on to training courses is another burden that schools that are already struggling should not have to suffer. When I spoke to people at my local secondary schools about the Bill, that was one of their main areas of concern. Someone at one of the schools outlined their concerns as follows in an email:

“The Academy currently can probably meet this duty as we have a qualified first aid trainer on the associate staff body; however, this would pose difficulties as it would be a requirement to ensure that there is someone with the appropriate level of training on staff—or have to be a brought in provision, to ensure that all young people receive the correct advice”.

That concern was echoed by other schools in my constituency, which were concerned by not only the staffing implications but the time allocation demanded of the school timetable.

Furthermore, schools would have to be required to find room in their budgets to pay for the provisions. We have heard about the cost of the manikins; I also spoke to some prominent union officials who live in my constituency. One said that making first aid education compulsory might not be cost-effective because at the moment first-aiders get a small allowance and training all teachers would be a massive expense. They would probably have to be retrained every three or four years. Is that cost-effective? Probably not.

[Mrs Trevelyan]

Those of us who support the Bill see it as an opportunity to educate a whole generation about life-saving skills. My hon. Friend is talking interestingly about cost, and he raises an important point. Would he be more inclined to support the Bill’s direction of travel if there were a clear understanding of the savings to the national health service of having life-saving skills among our population that are not there at present?

[Philip Davies]

No, because as I was going on to say, I do not think we could get an accurate figure on the savings; it would be completely arbitrary. How could we measure the savings? I am concerned about the effect on our schools of the Bill—that is what is before us today and I want to focus on it.

How would first aid education be measured in schools? If we make something compulsory in schools, we have to have some way of measuring that the school is doing it, otherwise it becomes complete nonsense. When people do courses elsewhere, they get a certificate or a badge, which gives them recognition. Presumably, at the end of the session, to check that somebody has got through the training—I am sure the promoter of the Bill will correct me if I am wrong—somebody will have to assess that people have met the required standard. If there were a 30-minute lesson without anyone knowing whether anything had been learned, that would be completely pointless. There would have to be some kind of test to work out that what needed to be learned had been learned. That goes without saying.

Would schools be required to provide some form of examination at the end of the training as a formal recognition or qualification? How would that work? Will there be a national model test that everyone will have to pass at the end of their lessons or will schools have to produce their own test? [Interruption.] I detect from the sedentary chuntering around me that there would be no such test. What on earth is the point of a lesson in first aid without testing whether people have learned what they need to in order to save somebody’s life? Surely the whole point is that people should become capable of saving somebody’s life. What is the point if we do not even know that?

--- Later in debate ---

[Philip Davies]

I should point out to my hon. Friend that, as it happens, sex education is not compulsory in schools, and long may that be the case, but that is a debate for another day; I am not going to get side-tracked.

The final point I want to make in my brief remarks, during which I have been interrupted on a number of occasions, is about the Bill’s legal consequences for schools. That is one of the serious fears that my schools raised with me when I asked them to consider its implications. In its submission to the Social Action, Responsibility and Heroism Public Bill Committee in September 2014, St John Ambulance mentioned that 34% of people said that the primary reason people are deterred from intervening in any situation requiring first aid was concern about the legal repercussions. I am glad to say that we have in the Chamber one of the finest legal brains in the country, my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Torridge and West Devon (Mr Cox) —and, I might add in passing, the most expensive.

Such a concern was also raised during my consultation with local schools. One headteacher told me that they

“would have concerns that a school could be liable to be sued or held accountable if a student carried out first aid and ‘got it wrong’ and the school had delivered that training”.

That covers the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for South East Cornwall, but it has not been touched on during this debate. We must consider such matters in a Bill before we press ahead with a worthy sentiment.

Clause 1(3) specifies that children will be taught which emergency first aid actions are

“appropriate in each such scenario, including the best management of circumstances where a person is or appears to be…unconscious and not breathing,…unconscious and breathing,…choking,…bleeding severely,…having a heart attack, or…having an episode arising from an underlying condition such as asthma or epilepsy”,

and also taught the appropriate deployment of emergency first aid education

“procedures and equipment including…cardiopulmonary resuscitation, and…defibrillators.”

Given that the text in the Bill explicitly sets out that schools will be responsible for teaching when first aid is appropriate as well as how to administer it, the concern raised by the headteacher of my local school is very real. What securities will be put in place to ensure that headteachers, staff and schools are protected from legal action should any first aid be incorrectly administered by a student, given that the Bill, by making it a compulsory element of education, directly creates a point of responsibility? I cannot find any such protections in the Bill.

[Mrs Trevelyan]

For clarification, is my hon. Friend suggesting that organisations such as St John Ambulance, which presently teaches first aid to large numbers of cadets, are at risk of legal action if one of their students fails to get their first aid right during an emergency?