EDUCATION

REAL-LIFE LESSON IN DRUGS

The BBC's latest docusoap, Jailbirds - set in New Hall Prison, Wakefield,
West Yorkshire - has come as a gift for teachers who want to incorporate
real-life stories into their school's drug-prevention programmes. Melissa
Meredith, 18, who is a former heroin addict and one of the series'
participants, has turned out to be a powerful negative role model.

When the programme showed her arrival in prison, it became clear that her
morning heroin hit was not the only reason she greeted her surroundings with
incomprehension: Melissa is from what is termed "a good home" and her
parents believe that peer pressure led to her addiction. Her transition,
from an ambitious girl who had been expected to do well in nine GCSEs at her
local secondary school to a prisoner, took only 12 months. Drug addiction
changed Melissa into a jailbird, something that neither her parents nor she
had expected.

Chris Terrill, the creator of Jailbirds, aims to make socially responsive
programmes, but he fell on this particular by-product of the series almost
by accident, during a talk about his career to sixth-formers at Brighton
College, an independent school.

"As soon as I began showing Jailbirds, the group was on the edge of its
seat," Mr Terrill explains. "I spent five years as a teacher, so I'm very
aware of young people's huge hunger for facts at that age."

The experience at Brighton is just the tip of the iceberg. In Jailbirds'
first week on air, the the programme's helpline received 150 calls. After
Melissa's story was broadcast, 4,000 people, mostly young, phoned about
drugs.

Mr Terrill sees this as a testament to the docusoap aesthetic, show don't
judge. "Traditionally, the drugs message is given a preachy approach that
can be a turn-off to more rebellious youngsters. We wanted to do something
different."

Anthony Seldon, Headmaster of Brighton College, endorses the approach. "Kids
need deterrents, but are bored by policemen holding up banned packages. This
series plays to a different part of their psyche, appealing to their
emotions."

Brighton College has never adopted a head-in-the-sand attitude towards
drugs. A visit from Leah Betts's father last term demonstrated to students
that drugs can be the cause of an untimely death, but before Jailbirds, few
had appreciated the deadening effects drugs can have on one's life.

Mr Seldon says: "It's not just that they say this isn't a middle-class
thing. Young people use every reason they can to claim that they won't be
affected, that it's about northerners or southerners; teenagers' skills of
projection rarely extend to seeing the potential impact on the people who
care about them most: their parents. Children don't think of the parental
point of view. They need to be made to think from this perspective. Seeing
Melissa's parents weeping at home shocked the youngsters into some sort of
realisation."

If evidence were needed of the unglamorous reality of the post-docusoap
lives of the Jailbirds stars, it is the Easter holiday that Melissa has just
passed at home. Trying to kick

her habit for the seventh time in as many months, she was confined to the
house, continually watched over by her parents.

Eight months after the series was made, Bob Meredith, Melissa's father and a
construction company general foreman in Barton-upon-Humber, says: "My wife
and I have come close to cracking up. We did the programme as a deterrent to
other children. Ultimately, if Melissa can get her act together, I'd like
her to go into schools to tell kids how dangerous drugs are."

Now off heroin, Melissa is accepting her celebrity status. Whether or not
she turns apostle, it is Melissa's own words that offer the most powerful
message of this modern morality tale of Jailbirds: "If you're on it, get off
it, because you will end up the same.

"You'll think, I wouldn't ever end up in jail, or robbing; but you will. It
just turns you bad. Bad. Lower than low."