I’ve been taking a look at the Local Priorities website to see which authorities have signed up to delivering on National Indicator 115, part of the set that makes up PSA 14. That’s the one which is about reducing the substance misuse by young people.
It turns out there are 36.
Bedfordshire, Bradford, Bristol, Buckinghamshire, Cheshire, Doncaster, Dudley, Essex, Halton, Harrow, Isle of Wight, Kirklees, Knowsley, Leicestershire, Lewisham, Liverpool, Middlesbrough, Milton Keynes, Norfolk, North East Lincolnshire, North Yorkshire, Northamptonshire, Northumberland, Plymouth, Redcar and Cleveland, Sefton, Somerset, South Tyneside, Southampton, St Helens, Stoke-on-Trent, Wakefield, Warrington, Wolverhampton, and York.
Can’t help but notice it’s about half of the number that went for NI 40 (which is about getting drug users into treatment).
I wonder whether that was because treatment is perceived to be easier to achieve than prevention, because the money to deliver is easier to identify or for some other reason. Perhaps readers from DAATs might want to comment…
Filed under: drug prevention, drug treatment
Probably a combination of the following:
Firstly there are a lot of other Indicators to choose from, many of which have historically had much higher priority in the relationship between Govt and partnerships. I.e in the PSA 14 there is the Teenage Pregnancy, NEETs indicator and first time offending, for which there is existing reasonably good measurment. If you’re going to pick one important measure locally re: vulnerable young people i would choose the NEETs or first time offending one over teh substance misuse one, and thats as a SM commissioner.
Secondly, and probably more importantly, take a closer look at the ‘reducing substance misuse’ indicator and you realise any LA would be crazy to touch it with a bargepole. Firstly its a measure of self reported prevalence in the general school population (going against all the last 4 years of local strategies moving towards targeting vulnerable groups). Secondly they are using the OFSTED Tell US survey to measure it – in my LAs experience a very poorly sampled and highly flawed measure. Thirdly the evidence, as we all know, for universal prevention/education interventions is poor. Having to some extent tracked the development of the PIs I think it would have been chucked out by DCSF if it had been up to them.
Interesting observations Sam. I’m not sure about the last one, certainly it’s not the sense I have from the people I talk to there.
On the evidence point I’d say under-invested in, unavailable, or not yet robust, rather than poor, but that’s just me.
However, I think I take the point about the TellUs survey, and others have made similar points to me about their experience with it.
[...] other thing that comes across is how similar the findings were for the group of authorities that chose to sign up to National Indicator 115 against the national data [...]