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Q. Why do you teach young children about drugs?
A. Quite simply, we do not. We start by teaching children how to make healthy choices to give them the confidence, as they progress through their primary years, to examine in a balanced way how drugs like medicines, alcohol; nicotine and illegal substances may adversely affect them. It is normally only in about Year 3 when children themselves raise the questions about why people drink and smoke that we start to help them consider these things for themselves. That is also when we start to help them learn what are known as resistance and assertiveness skills. These are the type of skills that would enable them to walk away with confidence from influences or pressures they may face from others to experiment with harmful substances.
Professor Winston described our approach very succinctly:
"Education for children at an early age is vital to help them adopt the right healthy habits so that their health later on is going to be as good as possible."
Download a film extract here (2.8MB).
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Q. Isn’t the job of schools or parents to teach children how to look after themselves?
A. We agree that parents have a very important role to play, as do schools. The reality, however, is that children are affected by many influences when they are growing up and our aim is to help schools, parents and others in the community to work together to promote positive health messages to children. We try to make this happen from the time we start to work in a local area when we recruit a steering group of local people to liaise with local authority partners concerned with the well-being of young people. We do this to make sure that our work can add real value to other neighbourhood projects and programmes. Then, as our work develops, we encourage individuals, businesses and voluntary groups to support a project to bring Life Education to local children. Articles developed with the help of local newspapers, TV and radio stations bring the issue of children’s health to wider public attention. All this early work means that by the time a local group has raised the money to buy a mobile classroom we hope to able to provide an integrated service that is of real and lasting benefit to a local community.
Community involvement is really important in health promotion so wherever we work we aim to act as a catalyst that brings together all who are committed to helping children make healthy choices.
Download a film extract here (2.8MB).
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Q. Shouldn’t the government be paying?
A. Across the country we get all manner of help in funding for our work in schools and with parents/carers. Some schools pay for us to visit them every year from their funds because they recognise the added value we can bring to their own work in health and drug education. In other areas local government funding through Drug Action Teams, or Neighbourhood Renewal budgets, for example, helps to pay for our work. We believe it is important that local communities are involved in helping to pay for our work with schools so that they ‘own’ and have some say in how we deliver our service. We expect to get some contribution from local statutory funds (government) but it is probably unrealistic to expect that government can pay for all our health needs and we believe it really does make a difference if we are all prepared to get involved.
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Q. How do you know your programmes work?
A. It depends what is meant by “what works”. This has a number of interpretations – depending on whether drug education programmes are attempting to persuade children never to try drugs, persuade those who have started to stop, or have no aims beyond giving children and young people the facts around drug taking effects and consequences.
We aim to give children and their families accurate information about legal and illegal drugs within the context of making healthy choices, through age and developmentally appropriate teaching developed and delivered with teachers. Evaluations of our programmes have shown that knowledge and understanding of the health topics addressed, are increased by our programmes, and it is widely recognised that increasing knowledge and understanding are important components of behaviour change.
Our main aim is to help children make positive health choices using teaching methods and content based on the best available evidence on effective health education. We also regularly survey teachers, children and parents to assess the impact of our programmes on children’s understanding of health-related issues. The findings are used to inform any needed adaptations to our programmes.
We acknowledge that children do not learn from us in isolation and are influenced by many different factors, including what they see and hear at home and their whole school experience, by the media, including advertising, popular music and TV programmes. They also learn from friends and extended family members, and members of their communities.
Given the many factors that shape children’s development, it is difficult to isolate the specific influences of our programmes. However, all of our work is underpinned by the guiding principle that we should do all we can to ensure children get the best opportunities to make their own health choices and that this is best achieved through effective, community-wide and ongoing health education. Many schools across the country demonstrate their faith in our work by working with us every year.
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Q. How can my child see your programmes?
A. We hope that you may find a local Life Education group operating in your area and you can check this out by searching on our own website. Local Areas
If we operate in your area we suggest to ask someone in your child’s school if they have heard of our work and if they have not why not refer them to our website?
If you cannot find us in our local area map you might like to talk to other parents about whether they think this would be a good thing for your school to be able to offer. You could also try finding out if your local Rotary Club knows of any clubs in the area that are supporting Life Education. Many Rotary Clubs do support our work and you could find your local club by clicking on the link below.
http://www.ribi.org/3_dist/districts.htm
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