This briefing paper is part of a series produced by the Drug Education Forum, for schools and others involved in drug education or informal drug prevention.

Schools have a duty to promote children and young people’s wellbeing, and are also required to promote pupils’ spiritual, moral, social and cultural development.

Key messages: Universal drug education programmes in schools have been shown to have an impact on the most common substances used by young people: alcohol, tobacco and cannabis.

This guide is the result of a series of workshops conducted in 2009 and 2010 by young people in Romania, India, Mexico and Canada. During these workshops, the authors identified gaps in the information young people have regarding sexual health and drug use.

Schools have been identified as one of the appropriate settings for addiction prevention since this is the place where pupils may come into contact with drugs for the first time and experiment with them, with the possibility of becoming addicted.

Drug And Alcohol Advisory Group – Key Recommendations - Increase parents’ and carers’ knowledge and skills about drug and alcohol education and prevention enabling them to better inform and protect their children; - Improve the quality of drug and alcohol education by making PSHE a statutory subj

This publication documents the experience of more than 100 community-based organisations in Southern Africa, Southeast Asia and Eastern Europe-in planning a prevention response to substance abuse among the youth of their communities.

The National Drugs Strategy 2001-2008 sets out a detailed programme of action to be implemented by Government Departments and Agencies to combat the very serious problem of drug misuse in our society.

The overall aim of these procedures is to protect students from substance