Education Bill

Memorandum submitted by Maidstone Grammar School for Girls (E 98)

1. Maidstone Grammar School for Girls (MGGS) is a secondary school in Maidstone, Kent. We decided to teach Emergency Life Support (ELS) Skills in our school because we felt these are skills that every child should know and feel confident of applying if the need arose.

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. MGGS teaches ELS as part of the British Heart Foundation Heartstart training scheme.

4. MGGS currently teaches ELS to between 160 and 200 pupils aged 11 to 18 per year.

5. They are taught ELS for between 1 and 5 hours per year as part of focus days, the Community Sports Leader Award (CSLA) and the Higher Sports Leader Award (HSLA).

6. MGGS believes that ELS should be made a compulsory part of the National Curriculum in England because these skills save lives. We would like to encourage the Committee to amend the Education Bill to make this possible.

7. The pupils, especially in the lower years, particularly enjoy the hands on training and the sense of achievement they get in mastering skills that may save a life.

8. The pupils have benefitted from ELS training through added confidence and a greater sense of community spirit.

9. The teacher who delivers this training gains a great deal of satisfaction from passing on ELS skills to a large number of pupils throughout the school. He keeps his skills in date by regularly attending the St John’s Ambulance First Aid at Work update course, regularly attending an Expedition Medicine course, and complying with any updates that are circulated by the British Heart Foundation.

March 2011