Most people learn first aid as adults, if they learn it at all, and usually because a job asked them to. By then a lot of chances to help have already come and gone. Children are perfectly capable of learning to recognise an emergency, call for help and start the basics, and they hold on to it. A child who learns the recovery position at nine may still know it at ninety.
That is the thinking behind Tomorrows Lifesavers, our schools programme. It trains young people across the school ages, starting with awareness in primary and building towards a recognised qualification by sixth form. The aim is simple to state and large to deliver: one million young people trained by 2035.
Schools rarely have the budget for this on their own, which is where local businesses come in. A company with social value or CSR commitments can fund first aid training for schools in its area and get something measurable back. When we ran a programme with the Hill Group, 195 pupils were trained, confidence rose by 82%, and the work generated £98,378 of social value, a return of around 29 to 1. With Eurovia, 101 pupils and staff took part and reported an 84% uplift in confidence, mapped against six of the UN Sustainable Development Goals.
Those are not soft numbers. They are the kind of evidence a social value manager can put in front of a board or attach to a tender. The reason we do it is the part that does not fit in a spreadsheet. Somewhere in every class is a child who will one day be the only person in the room who knows what to do.
If your business wants a community project that is easy to evidence and genuinely useful, funding first aid in a local school is a good place to start. Get in touch and we will talk you through how it works.