SHAHRP

School Health and Alcohol Harm Reduction Project

International Bulletin:

What can schools do to help young people in alcohol use situations?

Well designed school drug education is an important element within a community approach to youth drug issues, and systematic examination of the literature supports this finding. (Publications: 2, 3, 7). There are now several rigorously conducted and evaluated programs with meaningful behavioural effects which indicate that school drug education can play an important part within a community framework to reduce alcohol related harm.

To help identify the role schools can play in addressing youth drug use issues, some common understandings of appropriate and acceptable expectations about what school drug education can achieve should be discussed. The presumption that school drug education should or could have a continued long-term effect after young people leave school, or even after the immediate delivery of a program, needs to be questioned. As young people leave school they are exposed to less parental influence, have more disposable income, are drawn to public venues for social activity and in the case of alcohol, are starting to reach legal age. Logically then, expectations about school drug education impact should be limited to the time young people are at school or exposed to school programs, and that other strategies should be adopted as they leave school and are exposed to a new range of experiences.

This does not diminish the usefulness of school drug education as a prevention strategy, but rather acknowledges that its greatest impact is at a time when use and experimentation are high. A range of other community interventions, which take into account the changing circumstances that young people experience as they leave school, are required post schooling. Given this background, school drug education is best seen as one strategy within a whole of community response to drugs and young people. Singularly, it cannot hold all the answers, and logic tells us that frameworks, which target several areas of intervention within different settings over a life-time, are much more likely to reduce problems and benefit the community. Schools are just one part of this process, but an important part, particularly during the time students are at school and when experimentation, use and harms are high.