Schools to get funding for drugs education

SCHOOLS are to be offered up to pounds 5m to develop drugs education programmes as part of an initiative to be announced by the Prime Minister later this month.

Pupils aged from five to 16 should all receive lessons on the dangers of drugs under the new government strategy. Teachers will be offered extra training to help them to cope with pupils who are taking drugs or who have come into contact with them.

News of the initiative coincides with a warning today from headteachers that many children are now starting school at five with personal knowledge of drugs gained from relatives or neighbours, and that children as young as six or seven are experimenting with solvents.

The programme will be unveiled by John Major as part of a comprehensive strategy for co-ordinating drugs initiatives run by the Department for Education, the Department of Health and the Home Office. It follows the launch of the Central Drugs Co-ordinating Unit early this year.

Although an exact figure for the schools' funding will not be known until the Treasury sets the spending for the next financial year, it is expected to be between pounds 3m and pounds 5m.

In addition to offering training grants to all local authorities, the government will single out 10 areas for help with innovative drugs education projects which may later spread to the rest of the country. Areas where the problem is at its most acute will be targeted for this type of support.

Schools will be invited to bid for government money, which will be topped up by local authorities, to help them to bring in nurses, police and drugs agency workers to work with pupils.

They may also win grants to make school governors aware of the problem and to develop imaginative ways of teaching pupils about drugs.

The growing need for new initiatives will be underlined today in papers due to be submitted to ministers by the National Association of Head Teachers. It adds that teachers are often less well-informed about drugs and solvents than their pupils, and so are ill- equipped to spot problems.

The NAHT has called for all teachers to be taught about drugs as part of their initial training courses. It says that in general, primary schools have failed to address the problems and may feel that because they are not in an inner-city area, they do not have a problem.

Peter Walker - headmaster of the Abbey School at Faversham, Kent, and a member of the Government's Advisory Committee on the Misuse of Drugs - said drugs education should be as much a part of school life as lessons on personal hygiene or healthy eating.

'I believe that every secondary school in the country and possibly every primary school has a drug problem.

'I could not prove it beyond doubt, but the figures indicate that four out of five pupils have tried something by the time they are 16.

'If that is the case and it is spread over the whole country, it is a big problem.'