Education Bill

Memorandum submitted by St Anthony’s Girls School (E 69)

1. St Anthony’s Girls School is an 11 – 18 all girl’s school in Sunderland in Tyne & Wear. We decided to teach Emergency Life Support (ELS) Skills in our school as we felt it was an important life skill to teach the pupils of our school.

2. ELS skills are the set of actions needed to keep someone alive until professional help arrives. They include performing cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR), dealing with choking, serious bleeding and helping someone that may be having a heart attack.

3. St Anthony’s Girl’s School teaches ELS as part of the British Heart Foundation Heartstart training scheme.

4. St Anthony’s Girls School currently teaches ELS to 430 children aged 13 - 16 per year.

5. They are taught ELS for two hours per year as part of their year 9 PE lessons and as a reminder in year 10 as part of Personal Development day.

6. St Anthony’s Girls School believes that ELS should be made a compulsory part of the National Curriculum in England because we believe all pupils should have some knowledge in dealing with an emergency situations prior to it happening. We would like to encourage the Committee to amend the Education Bill to make this possible.

7. The children in the school enjoy the ELS lessons, they contribute extremely well showing excellent background knowledge in this subject. All the girls show interest when placing each other in the recovery position and practicing CPR. Their responses towards the lessons are positive.

8. When I started delivering Heartstart courses it was on a voluntary basis, any pupil who wished to attend could. One of our sixth form girls Laura Black came along to the sessions. A few months later, she started working in a restaurant and one of her customers started choking. Laura put the skills I had taught her into practice and helped the customer. Laura did say that without the knowledge she had learnt from Heartstart that she may have panicked and not have known what to do.

9. The staff in the PE department enjoy teaching ELS to the pupils; they feel they have plenty of resources from Heartstart to enable the delivery of the course. Any new information is disseminated from the course leader during department meetings, notes in letter racks and verbal communication

March 2011