10 Mar 2010
Street-wise? Substance use in town and country as reported by young people
David Regis of the SHEU has a paper in Health and Education looking at rural and urban young people and drug use.
This is a subject he talked about at a Mentor conference last year - see the slides here.
In his article he says:
We can say with some confidence there is little evidence that young people in rural areas face any less of a challenge from substance use or anti-social behaviour than those in rural areas. In fact, several lines of enquiry over 10 years have shown that there can be higher use of tobacco, alcohol or illegal drugs in rural communities.
Read the whole thing here.
10 Mar 2010
Lord Layard on PSHE
Richard Layard, the prominent economist and advocate for wellbeing, used the Second Reading debate of the Children, Schools and Families Bill, in the House of Lords, to set out his thoughts on PSHE becoming statutory.
I think it's worth reproducing in full:
My Lords, I strongly welcome the Bill, especially the clauses which make personal, social and health education compulsory subjects in the national curriculum. I should like to talk about that.
I had the good fortune to be a member of the Good Childhood Inquiry, and we were one of the many organisations that recommended what is now included in the Bill. In her opening remarks, the noble Baroness, Lady Verma, said nothing much about her party's attitude to this key issue. I will make clear why it is so important that this goes into law. Of course, it is not an original idea: the...
10 Mar 2010
RedNeT - an ICT prevention intiative
Below are links to the presentations made by Dr Ornella Corazza and Zoe Davey about the work they are doing on the RedNeT project and about how they are tracking the rise of novel compounds through the internet.
As you'll see one of the key points that both make is that there is very little medical evidence as yet as to what long term harms these drugs may do, nor does the buyer know whether they are getting what they paid for.
Dr Ornella Corazza from The Drug Education Forum on Vimeo.
Presentation on the RedNeT project, and internet based drug prevention project focusing on novel compounds.
Zoe Davey, presentation on RedNeT and Mephedrone from The Drug Education Forum on Vimeo.
Zoe Davey from the Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London talks about the Recreational Drugs European Network: an ICT prevention...
09 Mar 2010
Most people don't think that kids hanging around is a problem
The Home Office have published a new paper about the perception of anti-social behaviour (ASB) that may be of interest to readers.
In talking about what can be done to ameliorate perceptions of ASB they say:
Public information strategies such as ensuring residents are fully informed about local patterns of crime and disorder in ways which may mitigate fear and promote individuals’ sense of control over risk in their neighbourhoods, and fostering positive media relations (e.g. between the local authority and local newspapers) to encourage the dissemination of ‘success stories’ in tackling ASB, and positive stories about young people, and to discourage ‘scare stories’ and the misrepresentation of isolated or unusual instances of ASB as commonplace.
But they also point out that while a lot of...
09 Mar 2010
RedNeT - an ICT prevention intiative
Last week the Drug Education Forum was pleased to hear from two of the researchers who will be working on the RedNeT project, an ICT prevention service addressing the use of novel compounds in vulnerable
individuals, including young people.
Given the story covered in the Mail and Telegraph today about a school in the Midlands where there has been apparently large numbers of pupils using Mephedrone this intervention could prove to be immensely helpful.
The link below is takes you to the presentation we received from Dr Ornella Corazza and Zoe Davey. I am currently editing video I took of the presentations and will look to post that on the blog when I can.
RedNeT Presentation
09 Mar 2010
Prevention - Sun block not band aid
The following are the notes I took at a public lecture on 8th March 2010 given by Professor Tom McLellan, Deputy Director from the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy at the Institute of Psychiatry in London.
Professor McLellan started by outlining the strategy that the administration is putting into place:
Introducing a national prevention system
Ensuring primary care’s role in early intervention
Closing the gap between those that need treatment and those currently in receipt of treatment
Special consideration for those who are involved in the criminal justice system
Better data
My notes are primarily focused on the first point in this strategy.
Professor McLellan set out the way the administration sees the issue of drug use in the US and argued that not enough was being done to reach...
05 Mar 2010
Does doing it online mean doing it faithfully?
Prevention Action take a look at the CLIMATE School's work that Nicky Newton presented to a seminar the Drug Education Forum organised later last year.
They say:
The researchers acknowledge in the their report the potential weakness of relying so heavily on self-reporting – not only for a verdict on the course, but also for the students' own assessment of their alcohol and cannabis consumption.
But they defend the result: "While the demand characteristics would have been operative at the end of the course, it is hard to think that the demands of an anonymous web-based survey would have distorted the results after six months.
"Studies have found that self reports of transgressive behaviors such as substance use correlate with alternative assessment methods such as behavioral observations. In addition, online...
05 Mar 2010
Does the Smokefree Class Competition create bullies?
Asks this research.
Thankfully the answer appears to be no, in fact the researcher say:
No significant pre–post differences across treatment assignment groups were found on any bullying measure using generalised linear latent and mixed models. For being isolated, the trends suggested that the programme, if anything, fostered lower levels of isolation at follow-up, especially for those who perceived high levels of isolation at baseline.
If you want to find out more about the Smokefree Class Competition there's a presentation that was recently delivered to a workshop on prevention organised by the Executive Agency for Health and Consumers here.
05 Mar 2010
Young Runaways Education Resource
Via email:
The Children's Society has launched an online source of information to help prevent young people in the UK from running away. The Young Runaways Education Resource, developed by The Children's Society in collaboration with the DCSF, will provide a tool for schools to help intervene when children show signs of being ‘at risk’.
This free online resource, hosted on The Children's Society’s MyLife 4 Schools website, aims to help teachers and youth workers to warn young people about the dangers of running away and looks at the support networks available to those contemplating it. This project is part of the delivery of the Young Runaways Action Plan published by DCSF in 2008.
The resource offers lesson plans for teaching National Curriculum PSHE Key Stage 2, allowing teachers to teach the basics of...
05 Mar 2010
Drug Policy Guide - IDPC
The new Drug Policy Guide from the International Drug Policy Consortium has this to say about drug prevention:
Effective drug prevention interventions need to be designed as an integrated response at individual, community and environmental levels. They should focus to a greater extent on social and environmental factors, such as poverty and social exclusion, that facilitate drug problems.
The paper goes on to critique current prevention practice, arguing that the evidence base is now clear that the approaches most widely tested have limited impact. They say:
none of these [meta] studies has conclusively demonstrated that these interventions could be universally implemented to bring down the overall level of drug use across society. Many reports have clearly stated that national programmes of drug prevention had, at best, a...
03 Mar 2010
United Kingdom Drug Situation
The annual report from the UK Focal Point on Drugs has a chapter on prevention.
It says:
Universal drug prevention initiatives are an important area of policy. Communication programmes, such as 'FRANK' in England and 'Know the Score' in Scotland, provide factual information and advice to young people and their families. In Northern Ireland, the Public Health Agency develops public information campaigns for various target groups and settings, and in Wales a bilingual (Welsh and English) helpline, 'Dan 24/7', is available. Throughout most of the United Kingdom, drug prevention is part of the national curriculum and the majority of schools have a drug education policy and guidelines around dealing with drug incidents. Guidance on drug education recommends an approach that incorporates all psychoactive substances, including alcohol and...
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About this blog
This blog tries to pick up relevant media and research stories about drug education. It mainly focuses on information in England as this is the geographical remit for the Drug Education Forum. We welcome comments that are on topic.Categories
Recent Posts
- RedNeT - an ICT prevention intiative
- Lord Layard on PSHE
- Street-wise? Substance use in town and country as reported by young people
- Prevention - Sun block not band aid
- RedNeT - an ICT prevention intiative