First Aid Techniques: National Curriculum

Debate between Nick Gibb and Julie Hilling

Tuesday 10th March 2015 Westminster Hall

[Mr Gibb]

If not, I am sure that he or she has been snapped up elsewhere.

We heard powerful speeches from the hon. Members for Erith and Thamesmead (Teresa Pearce) and for Vale of Clwyd (Chris Ruane); I am sure the latter will receive a letter from either Willie Walsh or Richard Branson, depending on which airline did not have a defibrillator. There was also a powerful speech from the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon).

I recognise that the intention of the hon. Member for Bolton West is to ensure that more people have the knowledge and skills that could prove so valuable in assisting a child, teacher or someone visiting a school who suffers a cardiac arrest. However, whether teaching such knowledge and skills should be an addition to the national curriculum is another question.

The new national curriculum, which came into force in September 2014, represents a clear step forward for schools. It will ensure that all children have the opportunity to acquire the essential knowledge in key academic and non-academic subjects. However, I am afraid that it has now become somewhat routine for Education Ministers to come to such debates to make the case against the inclusion of a particular new requirement in the national curriculum. Proposals such as this are often supported by a persuasive argument, but their sheer number means that we need to start from a position of caution when addressing them.

The national curriculum creates a minimum expectation for the content of curriculums in maintained schools. Quite deliberately, it does not represent everything that a school should teach. Also, schools do not have a monopoly on the provision of education to children; parents and voluntary groups outside school also play an important role.

Many schools choose to include CPR and defibrillator awareness as part of their PSHE teaching. In the introduction to the new national curriculum, we have highlighted the expectation that PSHE should be taught, and improving the quality of PSHE teaching is a priority of this Government. However, we do not want to prescribe exactly which issues schools should have to cover in PSHE or other related parts of what we would call the school curriculum, as opposed to the national curriculum.

Prescribing a long list of specific content to be covered could be unproductive, leading to a tick-box approach that did not properly address the most important issues. Nor would it ensure that schools addressed those matters that were most relevant to their pupils. Indeed, we should trust schools to provide the right education for their pupils, within the overall framework of the national curriculum.

[Julie Hilling]

I had some optimism at the start of the Minister’s speech, but I have come back to a state of depression after listening to what he has had to say. He is talking about a list of issues that come to him, but how many of them could save 150,000 lives a year and how many would combine a range of issues including citizenship and boosting confidence? I ask him to consider the fact that this subject potentially has a special, indeed unique, position in our national curriculum.

[Mr Gibb]

I am not arguing against the inclusion of CPR in a school’s teaching curriculum; I am arguing about whether teaching these things should be statutory. There is more than one way to achieve an objective.

Also, if we look at the list of issues that people argue should be included for consideration in the national curriculum, we see that many of them would save a significant number of lives each year: relationships; drugs and alcohol; emotional and mental health, and well-being; emergency life support skills; homelessness; forced marriage; violence; transgender issues; tobacco; animal welfare; bullying; gambling; gender equality; cancer; symptoms of brain tumours in young people; fire and road safety; body image; the UN declaration on the rights of the child; environment; the dangers of carbon monoxide; cooking; media literacy; knife crime; parenting; chess; and foetal alcohol spectrum disorder.

Those are all specific cases where Governments, including the previous Government, have been lobbied over the years for things to be included in the national curriculum. It would be easy for any Minister—Conservative, Labour or Liberal Democrat—to say yes to those issues, only to find that there was little time in the national curriculum for the core academic subjects that we want children to learn. However, that does not mean that we do not think those other things should be taught in schools.

CPR is included in the non-statutory PSHE programme of study produced by the PSHE Association, which should please my hon. Friend the Member for Romsey and Southampton North. That suggested programme of study, which was produced by some of the leading experts in PSHE teaching, includes teaching young people how to recognise and follow health and safety procedures and ways to reduce risk and minimise harm in risky situations, and how to use emergency and basic first aid. Many schools also make use of organisations such as the Red Cross and St John Ambulance to provide information to young people about first aid and dealing with emergencies.

The British Heart Foundation has been mentioned by a number of hon. Members. It has offered to provide free CPR training kits to every secondary school in the country, allowing young people to gain first-hand experience of that important life-saving skill. The training kit covers how and when to perform CPR on an adult or child; how and when to put someone in the recovery position, which was referred to in the debate; and how and when to use a public access defibrillator. It contains an educational DVD demonstrating how to carry out CPR while trainees join in by using mannequins, so that no instructor is needed. The kit includes 35 mannequins, enabling every pupil in a class to learn CPR together.

We will work with the British Heart Foundation to promote that kit to schools. Indeed, the DFE is notifying all schools of the foundation’s “Call, Push, Rescue” kit in the next all-school termly e-mail, and we will continue to work with the foundation to promote its resources, as well as those provided by St John Ambulance and the British Red Cross, to all schools.

Many schools are already making good use of the resources and opportunities that are available to teach CPR, and to raise awareness of public access defibrillators. At Fulford school in York, for example, CPR training is managed by the deputy head teacher as part of his responsibility for pastoral care and character. One day each year is set aside to train all year 7 students; CPR training is part of their personal development lessons. At the last training session, around 30 teachers stayed behind to help and to learn the skills themselves. Feedback from the parent council has been favourable, as has been the response from students.

Other schools approach the training in a different way. For example, at Devonport high school for boys, CPR training sessions using the “Call, Push, Rescue” kit have been run in PSHE classes on Friday mornings. Since the school received the kit, year 10 students from three of the school’s six houses have undertaken the training.

I again thank the hon. Member for Bolton West and other hon. Members for their thoughtful and constructive contributions to the debate. I reassure them that I agree with them about the value and importance of first aid skills, and I also support access to defibrillators in schools. Although we do not believe that adding teaching on those issues to the national curriculum would advance the cause most effectively, we will always remain open to further discussions about the best way to promote those issues to schools and to ensure that schools have the resources they need to keep their staff and pupils safe.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Nick Gibb and Julie Hilling

Monday 19th January 2015 Commons Chamber

[Julie Hilling (Bolton West) (Lab)]

According to the Minister, schools should be able to choose whether to teach emergency life support skills, but we do not allow a choice in other subjects. Does he not agree that it is worth two hours so that we can transform our society, make every school leaver a life saver, and so save potentially 150,000 lives a year?

[Mr Gibb]

I understand the hon. Lady’s passion on this, which is shared by Government Members as well, but what is taught in personal, social, health and economic education is up to the schools, and we do not want to have an over-prescribed school curriculum. We have created a carefully balanced curriculum between central prescription and autonomy for professionals, and this is a matter for professionals. All schools are free to teach these very important skills, but we must leave some matters to schools to decide.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Nick Gibb and Julie Hilling

Monday 1st December 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr Gibb]

I thank New College and other proposers that have submitted free school applications for their hard work and commitment. I pay tribute to my hon. Friend for his work and support for the New College bid. Free schools are giving local communities and teachers the freedom to come together and establish new high-quality schools that are raising academic standards. We are currently assessing all wave 8 applications against the published criteria, and we will soon write to applicants to notify them whether they have been selected for interview.

[Julie Hilling (Bolton West) (Lab)]

We are constantly told that free schools are outperforming all other maintained schools. Will the Minister comment on his own Department’s admission that not only have a very small number of free schools actually been inspected, but that the

“findings cannot be interpreted as a balanced view of the quality of education nationally”?

[Mr Gibb]

Of course, many of the schools have only just opened—they have been open for only one year or two years—and not all of them have yet been inspected. However, many have been inspected, and 24% of free schools inspected have been judged outstanding. That is under the tougher framework that Ofsted now applies. The rate is higher than for schools as a whole.

Careers Service (Young People)

Debate between Nick Gibb and Julie Hilling

Tuesday 13th September 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Gibb]

The hon. Lady makes a valid point. We de-ring-fenced all the components that make up the early intervention grants, and that funding is £2.2 billion, rising to £2.3 billion next year. That is a very large sum. I acknowledge that we had to reduce it by 10.9% as we moved into the coming year, but that is a consequence of the many very difficult decisions we have had to make in government as a result of the budget deficit. I am sorry to sound like an over-wound gramophone, but those are the consequences of being in government and of inheriting a budget deficit that had to be tackled if we were to get our economy moving again. Young people suffer more than any other group in society when an economy is floundering, and we are in the middle of a very difficult world economic crisis driven by world debt, so we have to get our budget deficit under control if we are to survive as an economy through such difficult periods. I think the best thing for young people is to get our economy growing as soon as possible. That is why we have had to make those decisions.

Local authorities currently have a duty to provide careers advice, and they fulfil that duty through the Connexions service—a service that has, I am afraid, had mixed reviews. The Education Committee’s report said, in measured terms:

“Connexions services have provided careers guidance to individuals alongside wider support services targeted, in general, at more disadvantaged groups; and some Connexions services have been more successful than others in discharging these two duties equally successfully.”

Alan Milburn, who was referred to by the right hon. Member for Leigh, was a little less circumspect in his report on access to the professions when he reported a number of surveys that suggested low levels of satisfaction among young people with the careers guidance they received from Connexions, showing that 45% of over-14s received either no careers advice or advice that was poor or limited. He went on to say:

“Throughout our work we have barely heard a good word about the careers work of the current Connexions service.”

It is very difficult to listen to the emotional tones of the right hon. Gentleman when that is the legacy of the very careers advice that he is so passionate about providing to young people.

[Julie Hilling (Bolton West) (Lab)]

I find it slightly odd that the Minister is not quoting from the Department for Education survey of 5,000 young people, which found that more than 90% were satisfied with the service that they had received. That survey was carried out by his own Department.

[Mr Gibb]

I am not sure what service those people were receiving from Connexions, but there is no doubt that all the surveys showed dissatisfaction with the careers advice given by Connexions. There is more satisfaction with the advice that it gives to vulnerable young people on how to get back on track and back into the mainstream, and I acknowledge that that part of the service has been of a higher quality.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Gibb]

Local authorities still have a duty to provide careers advice, because section 68 of the Education and Skills Act 2008 is still in force, and they are required to do so. They are making decisions based on the very difficult financial settlement that we were left with by the previous Administration, but there are good examples of good practice from around the country, including Northamptonshire. In April we published statutory guidance setting out how local authorities should continue to meet that statutory duty under section 68 to encourage and help young people to participate in education and training. We are publishing on the Department’s website best practice from around the country.

[Julie Hilling]

I thank the Minister for giving way yet again; he has been very generous. Will he confirm that the careers advice will be given by professionally trained and qualified careers advisers? Will he also confirm that as soon as the Education Bill goes through, local authorities will retain responsibility just for the NEETs and not for everything else, which will transfer to schools, although schools have not been given any additional funding to provide that independent careers advice and guidance?

[Mr Gibb]

On the first point, the duty to provide advice to vulnerable young people who face problems in accessing education will remain with local authorities, whereas the duty to provide careers advice is transferring to schools. Of course, schools currently have a duty to provide careers education, within which an element of careers advice is also required. We are introducing that duty in the Education Bill at a time when we are acting to reduce bureaucracy and remove unnecessary duties and burdens from schools to allow them to focus on driving up standards, so the fact that we are introducing that new duty is a signal of the importance that the Government attach to high-quality careers guidance.

We are giving schools that duty for two reasons. First, we believe in the concept of decentralisation and of devolving decision making. We trust schools to take decisions in the best interests of their pupils, and restoring trust to the teaching profession is the cornerstone of our approach to education reform. Some argue, as has been argued today, that schools have an inbuilt bias to advise pupils to stay on in the sixth form regardless of whether it is in their best interests. That is why the Education Bill imposes the duty on schools to give advice that is independent.

Many of the incentives for schools were distorted by the structure of the league tables. Professor Alison Wolf set out this problem in her landmark report on vocational education. She said that false equivalencies have encouraged schools to enter pupils for qualifications that score highly in performance tables but are not necessarily valued by employers—effectively building bad advice into the system. Some qualifications have been proclaimed as being equal to four GCSEs, but they do not provide the broad grounding that students need to progress. As a consequence, some pupils have been encouraged to make choices that significantly reduce their prospects for success in later life.

That is why we are reforming performance tables—to end the damaging impact of false equivalencies, as well as removing perverse incentives in the funding system that have encouraged schools and colleges to offer qualifications that are easier to complete but do not necessarily provide the rigour and quality that students need. We are also introducing destination measures that set out where school leavers go after they leave school—whether into high-quality employment with training, to further education colleges or to university.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Nick Gibb and Julie Hilling

Monday 20th December 2010 Commons Chamber

[The Minister of State, Department for Education (Mr Nick Gibb)]

As my hon. Friend knows, the School Standards and Framework Act 1998 places a duty on local authorities and schools to limit the size of infant classes taught by one teacher to 30 pupils. It makes exceptions for exceptional circumstances, such as when a child moves into an area outside the normal admissions round and there is no other school within a reasonable distance. Under current legislation, however, siblings are not included in the list of permitted exception criteria. We announced in the White Paper a review of the school admissions framework so that it will be clearer for parents, and that review will consider the over-subscription criteria, including siblings and the important issue of twins and children from multiple births. In other words, yes.

[Julie Hilling (Bolton West) (Lab)]

T7. Young people may be forgiven for thinking that the Government do not like them very much following their decisions on EMA, tuition fees and the future jobs fund, and the destruction of the youth service. Can we assume that they have abandoned “Aiming High for Young People”, the 10-year strategy for positive activities? As many local authorities are not now fulfilling their statutory duties under the Education Act 2005, will the Secretary of State intervene?