Frank Furedi

Why are teachers scared of learning to give pupils First Aid?
By Alexandra Frean, Education Editor.

Two items of news in the last few days brought me up sharp. First, The Times Educational Supplement reported that teachers are reluctant to apply first aid to pupils in an emergency because they are scared of being sued by parents.

Many are adopting strict “no touching” policies because of “unfounded” concerns over compensation claims, according to a study by Thames Valley University.

Around 400,000 children suffer accidents or injuries at school each year. Even though no teacher has ever been taken to court as a result of helping a pupil in a medical emergency, teachers are reluctant to learn emergency first aid for children for fear of actually being asked to put their training into action.

This was followed by a report on Monday’s Radio 4’s Today programme that the Musicians’ Union is advising its members not to touch children during lessons to protect them from allegations of abuse.

The advice has infuriated many teachers who wonder how they can properly teach a child to hold a violin or play a keyboard without touching them. The cellist, Julian Lloyd Webber was appalled, suggesting that children’s progress at learning an instrument would be much slower as a result of such policies and adding that they might never learn to play properly.

These items brought to mind a recent pamphlet from the thinktank Civitas, Licensed to Hug, which suggests that the kind of over-protectiveness seen in both these news items is “poisoning” the relationship between adults and children.

The report, by Frank Furedi, Professor of Sociology at the University of Kent, and Jennie Bristow, who writes the monthly Guide to Subversive Parenting for the online publication spiked-online.com as well as running the website parentswithattitude.com, notes that a staggering 11.3m people in this country will need to be vetted by the Criminal Records Bureau if they intend to work with children in any way. They expressed sadness that relationships between children and adults were becoming increasingly formal and founded on a basis of mistrust.

But perhaps the most worrying aspect of this “safety first” approach to child protection is that it is unlikely to be very effective. As Furedi and Bristow point out, it “provides a ritual of security rather than effective protection.” I suspect that many parents would agree.

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First published by Times Online (London), 10 November 2008