DRUG WARNINGS TO PUPILS "MAY HAVE OPPOSITE EFFECT"

Drugs counsellors in schools can do more harm than good by inadvertently
glamorising the use of illegal substances, teachers said yesterday. Too
much stress on information about where to get help and too little on
pointing out the dangers could create the wrong impression, they said. In
one school a pupil had walked out of a session saying that the discussion
had made her feel like taking drugs for the first time, a teacher claimed.
In another, according to a school governor, a nine or 10 year old told his
mother that he might try drugs after listening to a talk from a drugs
education worker. Teachers said they needed more information about drugs
themselves and advice on how to educate the children who often knew more
than they did. Drug education should be a compulsory part of teacher
training, the Association of Teachers and Lecturers decided at their annual
conference in Bournemouth. More comprehensive drugs education should be
carried out, starting in primary schools, they decided.

Alcohol use, solvent abuse and smoking, particularly among girls, were also
high-lighted as growing problems.

David Lutwyche, a house-master from Lancing College, West Sussex, described
how one pupil had punched his wife after drinking several lagers and a
bottle of vodka. Another pupil had such problems with school that he was
drying out in a private clinic over the Easter holidays ready to take his
A-levels next term. "A year ago I lost five boys when that were expelled
for drugs offences. So clearly the drugs education we gave them did not
prove effective. But over 16 years I have had more problems sobering up 14
and 15 year olds from the effects of alcohol."

David Britton, a teacher at the Skinners Company Girls School in Hackney,
east London, said: "We have the Hackney drugs support unit which does a
difficult job going to schools talking to young people about drugs. "A
group of 11 year olds had been unresponsive to the information and
afterwards one of them said, 'These people are making us feel that we want
to take drugs and we would never have dreamed of doing it before'." However
Dudley Craig, team leader for the drugs education project run by Tower
Hamlets NHS Trust, said it was funded by the Home Office and follows
guidelines from the Department for Education and the Qualifications and
Curriculum Authority. The project, which is being monitored by the
Roehampton Institute, had been in the schools since 1995 and parents were
very complimentary about it. It had run 1,200 sessions for 9,000 pupils in
60 Hackney schools. The sensitivity needed when educating primary pupils
about drugs was raised by Judith Bennet, a retired teacher and a member of
the School Governors Association in Oxfordshire.

A parent of a child aged nine or ten at a rural primary school had told of
her concern over the drugs education given by a young man who had visited
the sc hool. She noticed that the young man was talking a lot about where
to get help when you were involved in drugs which she felt was not the
appropriate advice she would give to nine and ten year olds.

It worried her because she thought it was inappropriate and afterwards she
asked her son what he thought of it. He said that before the talk, drug
taking was something which had never occurred to him, but now he might try
it. Peter Smith, the union's general secretary, said drugs education should
become part of the teachers' qualification because it needed sensitive
handling. End