Welcome to our very first blog, the start of a regular slot. This new year begins with unprecedented challenge, with another national lockdown as the vaccine rollout races against this virulent new Covid variant. But we have a lot to look forward to here at Team Dan despite all this, and we wanted to kick off this series with a look ahead at all we’re excited about for 2021.
The highlight of this coming year will be the publication in May of a book for parents Fiona has written. Its title is I Wish I’d Known: Young People, Drugs and Decisions, because it’s very much the book Fiona wishes she’d been able to read as a parent before Dan died seven years ago. The publisher, Sheldon Press (a Hodder and Stoughton imprint) has written this: “I Wish I’d Known interweaves the story of one family’s terrible loss with calm, measured and practical advice for parents. It explores the risks posed by illegal drugs, and explains the way the adolescent brain makes decisions. There is practical advice for saying safe, information on reducing harm, and ‘talking points’ for parents and their children to do, talk about, look at, look up or consider.” We’ll be doing a lot more singing and dancing about the book over the coming months, so watch this space.
Our drugs and alcohol education will keep on going any and every which way we can, whether schools are open or closed, with all the flexibility we developed from the start of lockdown. As well as live-streamed and pre-recorded delivery, all our PSHE resources are available digitally for schools, including our new home learning units. But what we’re really excited about for 2021 is the day we know is coming when we can safely get out and about and back into schools in person again, because this is what we love best.
For parents we’ll be delivering our drugs and alcohol workshops on zoom, which continue to be more popular than ever. They’re so much easier for schools to organize, and (perhaps unsurprisingly) parents seem to prefer coming along to a workshop from the comfort of their sofa, rather than turning out to the school hall at the end of a long day, in that dim distant past when such things were possible. We’re getting such good numbers turning up, and fantastic feedback. At a recent workshop with a school that usually struggles to get attendance at parents’ events into double figures, we had well over a hundred sign up. More on this anon too.
We’re really excited about the virtual Theatre in Education tours coming up this term and next, taking the professional film of Tie It Up Theatre’s new production of Mark Wheeller’s verbatim play about Dan, ‘I Love You, Mum – I Promise I Won’t Die’, out and about to teenagers in London and across Scotland. We’ll need to wait till schools re-open now, but as soon as we can we’ll be back. We’ve been training up the cast of the last Wizard Theatre tour as Team Dan drugs educators, because they’ll be perfectly placed to deliver the interactive workshops that follow ‘performances’ (viewings of the film). Not only have they been so much part of the play themselves, they’ve also delivered the post-performance drugs education workshops throughout the last live tour. And of course, they’re professional actors, and all teachers know how much those dramatic skills come in handy for the best of delivery in the classroom or school hall. If you haven’t seen the trailer of this moving production you can have a watch here.
We’re also really excited about a graphic novel, play and teaching resources being created by special needs teacher and author Mark Harrington, which we hope will be published in Spring. They retell Dan’s story in an accessible way for students of differing abilities, with beautiful illustrations by Eve Yarnton. The teaching resources explore all the key issues students with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities need to be aware of about drugs and decision-making to keep themselves safe. Mark approached us because of the huge gap in provision and support for these students, some of whom can be particularly vulnerable when it comes to managing risk safely.
Another big event of our year is the third National Drugs and Alcohol Education conference which we’re co-organising with the Alcohol Education Trust. Postponed from last summer under lockdown, we’re keeping everything crossed that by the time 28 June comes around we’ll be safe to meet in person. Although online conferences have been great while nothing else was possible, and we’ve all been as creative as can be with the tools available, there’s nothing virtual that can quite replace the informal face-to-face (can you imagine such a thing!) chatting and networking these events are so valuable for. We have some great speakers and workshops lined up, a beautiful venue at the Guildhall in the City of London, and now just need to see the worst of this virus behind us.
Throughout the year our campaigning work to make social media a safer space for young people when it comes to drugs moves steadily onwards and upwards. If you missed Fiona’s work with the BBC and her ‘mums’ army’ in the summer you can see the One Show footage here, and the BBC Newsbeat documentary, Dealers in your DMs here. Fiona is now chairing an Online Harms working group focusing on this issue which starts meeting this month, formed of key people from the National Police Chiefs’ Council, National Crime Agency, Home Office, DHSC, Childnet, SWGfL, Volteface, UCL Dawes Institute for Future Crime, and Snapchat and Instagram. She’s also working with her MP, shadow policing minister Sarah Jones, to bring together cross-party MPs for a parliamentary meeting to look at what can be done from within government. It’s such an important issue, presenting very specific risks to young people, and it’s growing and not going anywhere any time soon.
There’s also a TEDx talk on the theme of transformation coming up in February for Fiona, training for Street and School Pastors as well as teachers and safeguarding professionals, work to develop online training modules for drugs educators and teachers, work with the NHS on support for bereaved parents, and lots more that we know about – and more exciting things we know will come along that we have no idea about yet, because this always seems to happen! So all in all, 2021 is a year with a lot in store for the DSM Foundation, and for all those we seek to support. Here we go!
