Life-saving Skills in Schools

Joan Ruddock Excerpts

Thursday 22nd November 2012 Commons Chamber

[Anne Marie Morris]

The hon. Gentleman makes an appropriate point. He is right. There is an additional benefit—on top of the volume of people who will end up trained—because cardiac arrest happens to young people as well.

[Dame Joan Ruddock (Lewisham, Deptford) (Lab)]

The hon. Lady is extremely generous in giving way, and I congratulate her on securing this debate. She mentioned a number of countries and US states where training is compulsory. Compulsory training could give us much greater chances of survival. I hope she will tell us she is in favour of mandatory training.

[Anne Marie Morris]

The right hon. Lady makes an appropriate and fair point. As they say in business, what gets measured gets done. We have training in this country, but it is not measured. There is no record of how much CPR is included. ELS is included in personal, social, health and economic education, but it is not consistent. We consequently do not get the results that other countries get.

Why do we raise the issue of life-saving skills now? We are doing so in part because we have the evidence, some of which I have just shared with the House, but there is also clear public support. In response to the British Heart Foundation survey in February 2011, 86% of teachers said ELS should be included in the curriculum, and 78% of children said they wanted to be taught it. The evidence is that they enjoy it, and that it gives them a broader sense of self-worth and value within the community. Seventy per cent. of parents believe it should be taught. This will not be an uphill battle, because everybody wants it.

There was a moment when ELS became front and foremost in everyone’s thinking—when Fabrice Muamba tragically collapsed on the football pitch in March. But for an individual with ELS skills coming on to the pitch, he may not have survived as well as he has. That led to the Love Heart campaign in The Sun—well done to The Sun; that was a great campaign that attracted a lot of support. Ultimately, a petition of 130,000 signatures was delivered, asking for us to ensure that we have ELS training in schools. Support in the charitable and third sectors is huge. The British Heart Foundation, the British Medical Association, Cardiac Risk in the Young, St John Ambulance and the Red Cross support it—I could go on, but I am conscious that time is not on my side.

As hon. Members have said, there are some great examples of the community providing training voluntarily. Dawlish community college in my constituency does one whole day on emergency life-saving skills for year 10s. A recent Ofsted report found the school to be good, and outstanding for leadership and management. Does that not show?

What is the way forward? The first option is to continue with the status quo, but as we have seen, results are patchy. ELS is included in PHSE, but it is not mandatory or delivered consistently. CPR is often not included. My view is that we will not achieve what we need to achieve as a society with the status quo.

The second option is making ELS a mandatory piece of the PHSE curriculum. Under the current review, although PHSE will not be mandatory, the Minister has said that bits of it will be identified and made so. ELS could be included in the science or physical education curriculums. The Minister could also consider including it as a compulsory element in teacher training, so at least our teachers will have the training. She could also think about including it as a necessary part of the National Citizen Service programme.

The second option has been debated on many occasions, and the objections to it have been very much the same each time. Let me briefly rehearse them and say why they no longer stand ground. The first argument is that the curriculum is too full and teachers need choice. I agree that the curriculum is too full and that we need to ensure that the core subjects are taught well, but I also agree with choice. It is appropriate to consider what is included in PHSE. When the matter was last debated, even my hon. Friend the Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton), who was then the answering Minister, could see the priority of ELS. He was lobbied to include knitting in PHSE, but agreed that knitting simply does not have the same value as ELS. It is perfectly possible both to include it and to retain flexibility in the curriculum. As I have said, it is only a two-hour course. On choice, we could say to schools, “It is compulsory, though you have the choice of including it in PHSE, science or PE, but it must be measured by Ofsted.” That would give flexibility.

The second argument usually advanced against the proposal is cost and resource. The British Heart Foundation has estimated that it will cost £2,200 a year per school, but that is not a huge amount of money. The charitable sector, trainee doctors and general practitioners can get involved in teaching on a voluntary basis. They will do it for free, and the cascade principle says that if we teach the teachers, they will teach others and so on. I suspect that the number of people wanting to get involved and to help for free would make this a relatively inexpensive activity.

We must set that against the cost to the public purse. If an increasing number of people have brain damage when they need not have it and are kept on life support machines in hospitals, or if there is an increasing number of people who survive but who must be supported at home, the bill goes up. A day in hospital costs £400 or £500. As hon. Members know, disability living allowance can be £131 a week. That adds up to a sizeable bill. It is not just about money—there is also a cost to the family and society. As a nation, we believe in prevention rather than cure. The question, therefore, is not whether we can afford to do this, but whether we can afford not to.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Smith]

The hon. Gentleman makes a good point. It is vital to understand what children are capable of, and that we do not underestimate the live-saving skills they can learn. There is hard evidence for that. In a scientific abstract to the international conference on emergency medicine in June, the journal Academic Emergency Medicine reported on a study assessing whether children can defibrillate. The study was done properly and rigorously, with control groups and so on, and chi-squared analysis of the conclusion. In concluded:

“This study demonstrates that children aged 11-years-old can use a defibrillator effectively and safely, and retain this knowledge over several weeks”—

and that active training, unsurprisingly, is the most effective way of teaching it to them.

[Dame Joan Ruddock]

There is perhaps even more important feedback in the case histories that the St John Ambulance has circulated to all hon. Members, where children of that age have been shown to save lives, either of their peers or of their parents in some circumstances.

--- Later in debate ---

[Elizabeth Truss]

I was just about to mention the right hon. Gentleman and IMPS. I will certainly take up the matter with the Department of Health in order to understand that specific point.

Schools are free to take up all the programmes I have just mentioned and to make use of those reputable organisations in order to bring the subject to life and teach it in a high-quality way in schools. I am keen to see a higher take-up of the subject; I think it is a good thing. I want to see it done in such a way that quality will be on offer. The hon. Member for Cardiff West (Kevin Brennan) asked how we could achieve what we want in Britain’s schools. Should it be done through compulsion or through winning hearts and minds? I favour the approach of winning hearts and minds and of improving practice in schools, rather than ordering something to be done compulsorily and not necessarily getting the quality we need.

When the national curriculum was first devised in the 1980s, it was seen as a slim guide to core knowledge, with schools having the freedom to teach in the way they saw fit. However, even its first draft was far larger than its originators intended. A lot of that came about through people wanting particular subjects to be included, often for laudable reasons. I am now working on the drafts for the new national curriculum at primary and secondary level, and it is our intention that it should be slimmed to reflect a framework for essential knowledge. It has been rather content-heavy in the past, which has restricted what schools teach and how they are able to teach it.

My hon. Friend the Member for North Swindon (Justin Tomlinson) has given me many helpful suggestions over the past few weeks. Even though I have not been in the job long, I have had quite a few meetings with him at which he has suggested various topics that he considers to be part of that core knowledge, all of which we are considering. It is our aim, however, to reduce unnecessary prescription throughout the education system.

[Dame Joan Ruddock]

I put it to the Minister that the teaching of life-saving skills is quite different from the range of other activities about which she has had representations. We are talking about learning a skill for life that could be taught in as little as two hours and that could save lives. There is nothing to compare to that, which is why it should be mandatory.

[Elizabeth Truss]

As I have said, I completely agree with those sentiments. This is an important area for students to study, but there are different and better ways of achieving that.