Janet:
According to St John Cymru, less than one in 10 people survive an out-of-hospital cardiac arrest, and nearly a third of UK adults would not have the confidence to intervene if they saw someone in need. Now, improved education of our youngsters is definitely the answer to this cardiac catastrophe. Children in England will be taught CPR and other lifesaving skills from September 2020, and every local authority in Scotland has committed to teaching CPR. The new curriculum, however, does not make the teaching of first aid and lifesaving skills compulsory, yet, according to the British Heart Foundation, nearly one in four could survive if all young people were trained. I appreciate that the Minister for Education wants to move away from prescribed subjects, however will you allow an exception by making CPR training a compulsory part of the new curriculum?
Mark Drakeford AM, First Minister:
The difficulty is, Dirprwy Lywydd, as the Member knows, that right around this Chamber there are people who argue for a whole range of exceptions to be made. Everybody here will have an example of something that they think and believe passionately should be made an exception to the rule in the way our curriculum is constructed. And, once you start to go down that route, the curriculum will stop being what we in this Chamber have said we want it to be: purpose-led and in the hands of teachers when it comes to implementation.
Of course, young people should be taught about these important things, and can be within our schools: 99 per cent of schools in Wales participate in the Welsh network of healthy schools schemes, with all that goes alongside that, including teaching young people about these things. But Mike Hedges made an important point in his supplementary question, that opportunities for learning first aid don't simply exist in schools. There are many other ways in which people can learn these skills. I myself took part in a fantastic scheme that Cardiff medical school students are running here in Cardiff. They held a session over in the Wales Millennium Centre here just before Christmas, where any member of the public could be trained in basic first aid to give them the confidence to intervene in the circumstances that Janet Finch-Saunders has mentioned, and there is a broader set of actions that need to be taken to address something that is, I absolutely agree, a very important issue here in Wales.
