Not long after Dan died, Fiona went into a couple of local schools to talk about what had happened to her beloved son. Her ambition was simple: to impart on young people the importance of the decisions taken about drugs and alcohol so they make the choices that mean they get home in one piece.
A few years on, the work in schools continues to go from strength to strength… even during an academic year that has become inextricably linked to the Covid-19 pandemic. Our small but perfectly formed team of drugs educators ran nearly 300 student workshops during the 2019-20 academic year, the majority free of charge in state schools. The interactive workshops, crammed full of evidence-based information, work best when run alongside the specially developed PSHE resources, and in total we reach nearly 24,000 students.
Before lockdown, our work in Scotland was quickly escalating, and we also delivered our first workshops to undergraduates (at Kings College Cambridge) and to an international school (in Prague, Czech Republic). We also developed and piloted a workshop about County Lines with Fearless, the youth arm of Crimestoppers (find out more about the organisation’s work in this area at https://www.fearless.org/en/campaigns/county-lines).
Our offering evolved quickly from March 2020, with the team developing “lockdown learning” resources (gratefully and well received by schools) and moving to virtual delivery – sometimes live but more often recorded, though both present different challenges – in a flexible way that reflected the changing needs of students and teaching staff. Our Mission Transition programme for Year 6s, specially designed to prepare pupils for the move secondary school, was also adapted so primary school teachers could deliver the content to those on site in “bubbles” as well as at home accessing remote learning.
We didn’t get to speak to as many young people as we would have liked – but that is always the case, because in an ideal world we would talk to every single person! – but we still made a significant impact, with students (and staff) frequently praising the non-judgemental yet touching approach, and saying how they felt better equipped to make safer choices as a result of spending a little time with us.
And that’s what it is all about.
- To find out about how the drugs education team can work with your educational setting, please contact amanda@dsmfoundation.org.uk
