Psychoactive Substances Bill [HL] — House of Lords, 2015-06-23
Topic: Health
Alan Thomas Howarth (Labour, Centre-left): I apologise that the Committee has to put up with an inordinate amount of talk from me, but I will be as brief as I can on what is a subject of major importance: how we strengthen education in relation to drugs. In introducing this proposed new clause, I congratulate my noble friends on the Front Bench on their excellent new clause set out in Amendment 104, which is grouped with this one The coalition’s strategy as enunciated in 2010 included reducing demand, and in that, education is or should be key. I would like to see the Secretaries of State for the Home Office, for Education, for BIS and for Health jointly reporting as proposed in the new clause set out in Amendment 104. My noble friends have called for an annual report on the subject of education, but it should be one that emanates from the Government as a whole, and particularly those departments The situation as it stands is that schools are required to provide drug education programmes and information about drugs in the science national curriculum. But not all schools, indeed a diminishing number, are required to deliver the national curriculum, and even in those that are, the evidence is that this fairly minimal requirement does not prove to be particularly effective in educating people about the realities of drugs. After much anguished debate, the last Government decided that PSHE should be a non-statutory subject in the national curriculum. It is fair to say that the last Government provided funding for early intervention to support children at risk, and I assume that the troubled families programme has something to offer in this connection I have read that the Government are spending some £7 million annually on drug education as a whole. On the other hand, the Minister of State at the Home Office, Mike Penning, told the House of Commons in a Written Answer on 2 June that the total spend on education and prevention campaigns in relation to new psychoactive substances from 2013 to 2015 had been only £180,556. That seems extraordinarily little. It would be helpful if the Minister provided the House with correct figures so that we know what the Government are spending on various aspects of drug education. Whatever it is, however, I would contend that it is inadequate The Home Affairs Select Committee of the House of Commons, in its 2012 report Breaking the Cycle, was scathing about the efforts being made at that time by the Government to promote education about drugs. It quoted the charity Mentor, which complained angrily: "We are spending the vast majority of the money we do spend on drug education on programmes that don’t work" The committee found that most schools provide drug education once a year or less. I have no doubt that there are schools that do very well, but the Home Affairs Select Committee was talking about the generality of schools. It reported that the Department for Education, with, one might say, a shrug of its institutional shoulders, had said that it does not monitor the programmes and resources that schools use to support their teaching. That is why, in subsection (4) of new Clause 13, I have proposed that the Secretary of State, "shall monitor the programmes and resources available to schools to support their teaching" It seems to me a dreadful dereliction of responsibility if that is not happening Education strategy in the fight against drugs must be transformed. When the public health campaign about tobacco got serious, it worked. The Secretary of State must insist that all secondary schools take seriously their responsibility to educate children about drugs. It may well be argued—and it may well be right—that education should start before children reach the secondary level; certainly it should apply in every secondary school Effective techniques exist to teach young people resilience and the capacity to make their own considered decisions. As the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, said, we must act on the demand at that point—legislation is not going to do it on its own. We must bring about a society in which fewer people want to use these substances. The way to make a very good start on that is to get serious about education I have made specific proposals about the role of Ofsted and the equivalent agencies in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. School inspections should routinely examine what is happening with drug education in schools, and Ofsted’s findings should go into its reports on each school. Ofsted should also publish an annual report on the state of drug education in schools in each nation of the United Kingdom and make recommendations about necessary improvements. That way, not only would the message get out to all schools but all schools would be invigilated and monitored on the way they acquit themselves of this responsibility More broadly, it is not just specific drug education that matters: it is the quality of education overall. The propensity to use drugs correlates with poor educational standards and is found more widely in communities where, as things stand, the standard of education offered in local schools is not what we would wish. Deficient education is among the pathologies that incubate drug abuse. It is a broader question The same vigour needs to be brought to the approach in further and higher education. The funding councils should make it a condition of publicly provided support for the universities that they demonstrate that they have programmes to help people understand the realities of drugs and that they report on what they are doing every year. Universities UK ought to promote best practice, not only in relation to new psychoactive substances but to prescription drugs that are being widely misused by students in universities, as I have mentioned before Drug users of all ages need help to become properly informed, properly risk aware and properly capable of taking their own sensible, responsible decisions. I hope that the Minister, in responding, will also tell us how his department, which has lead responsibility in government, plans to work with other government departments, particularly with the Department for Education, and to ensure that we have a coherent strategy that tackles this problem at the roots and does not simply try to patch things up when they have gone wrong. I beg to move.