Having published our response to the consultation I thought it would be helpful to point to what others are saying. I’m going to focus here on what they’ve said about drug education but as you’ll appreciate their responses are much more comprehensive.
The Children’s Society agrees that the delivery of drug education should be within personal, social and health education (PHSE), we also believe that information can be taught to children and young people about substances throughout the current national cirriculum, e.g. the effects of using substances on the body in Biology, drug laws within History and drug selling, supply routes and trafficking in Geography. By encorporating information about drugs throughout the cirriculum more attention and knowledge would be given to young people. The Government needs to send a strong message to schools and other educational settings about their involvement in the implementation of the drug strategy being key in providing information and education to children and young people. Some experience from practice suggests that if drug education is taught within a school, it is seen to be a problem within that school, which is not the negative portrayal that is supportive for young people. A quality benchmark should exist for all drug education, currently schools can choose what stance they wish to take and who they would like to deliver it, this can lead to question marks over the quality of the education that is being provided.
There is no conclusive evidence that universal drug education in and of itself is equivalent to ‘prevention’ if this means reducing the number of young people who will experiment with drugs. As one stakeholder told us:
“We cannot inoculate young people against drug use with just a few hours of drugs education.”
However, DrugScope is keen to see the forthcoming (but apparently delayed) results of the Blueprint programme to see if this is able to shed more light on this issue.
What evidence there is about drug education indicates that it can help to delay the onset of drug use. There is an established link between trying drugs at a later age and a reduced risk of drug-related harm. Drug education can help to inform young people about risk and steer them away from the most harmful drugs, the most dangerous patterns of substance misuse and the riskiest forms of drug administration.
There may be many reasons as to why substance misuse education has not delivered the results hoped for, particularly with respect to changes in young people’s drug use. Amongst these are the significant amounts of curriculum time needed to be devoted to such initiatives. With so many demands and competing priorities for teacher and pupil time it is not surprising that substance misuse education is often curtailed. The limited impact of substance misuse education is therefore perhaps understandable particularly when stacked against many other formidable cultural, social and economic influences.
None of this should be interpreted as suggesting substance misuse programmes in schools should not be carried out nor their quality improved. In the 21st century we believe that young people must have access to information about various substances and the opportunity to explore the issues surrounding their use as well as to develop the skills and attitudes that promote successful outcomes more generally.
As with school-based programmes, there is only limited evidence for effectiveness of prevention programmes delivered in non-school settings and most reported evaluations have methodological problems, in particular high levels of loss to followup. The best evidence is for family interventions, such as the Strengthening Families Programme, and for motivational interviewing.
We believe that it is important to invest in effective drug education with SMART objectives. These might include:
- Improving knowledge and information about drugs and drug use
- Increasing an understanding of the role that drug use and misuse play in our communities
- Delaying the onset of experimentation with legal or illegal drugs
However, we cannot expect that an educational intervention on its own can ever achieve an outcome of life-long abstinence from drug use.
In terms of prevention, late use onset is a strong protective factor and well-delivered drug education can help achieve this.
If you have a response you’d like me to highlight then let me know.
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