Pathways to Problems Event

I was one of the speakers at yesterday’s Pathways to Problems event and I thought I should share my slides.

I’d been asked to reflect on what we understand by effective drug education, and to highlight some of the evidence that seems to have emerged since Pathways to Problems was published.

The essence of the argument that I tried to make was that often when discussion about drug education takes place it happens in a context where there’s an expectation that it alone should be expected to change the behaviour of the children and young people that receive it, and that it works in the same way as inoculation works; ie that a dose should have a long term effect on behaviour. I argued that this wasn’t based on what the evidence would bare and that we need to develop a narrative which recognises the role of education in a broader strategy, which working together should be expected to move us towards our desired goals.

I pointed out that public discussion about drug education often saw it as something delivered by schools, when in reality children and young people have a far more diverse range of information and education to draw on. And that when talking about drug education we need to be clear that our definition includes legal and controlled drugs as well as illegal ones, as it is the legal drugs that children and young people have much more contact with.

I drew on the findings from Ofsted to talk about what children and young people say they want from drug education, pointing out this had been reflected in other’s (and my own) work with young people.

I then took a brief look at two programmes – ones that will be familiar to readers of this blog – that seem to have had positive results at least during the periods during which they were being carried out.

I finished by highlighting some caveats about what I’d said.

In questions I was asked about the number of ex-users delivering drug education – to which I said I didn’t know the numbers. I did say that it seemed to me to be less about whether a person was an ex-user and more about what they said and the messages they gave to the recipients, but perhaps should have also pointed to the need for quality standards for those commissioning external providers (ex-users or not).

I was also pulled up for not mentioning the role of the police and others in “sending a message” about drugs through their enforcement actions.

Filed under: ACMD, Conferences