Publication
Primary school tobacco education: A needs assessment
Summary
The aim of the project was to investigate the views of primary six and seven teachers on the resource needs within the field of tobacco education with a view to informing HEBS on issues to be addressed when designing future resources.
The research was conducted in twenty-five schools, spread throughout four locations in Scotland. Data was collected through focus groups, paired interviews and single person interview.
An understanding of the 5-14 curriculum, and its implications for classroom practice is important for any resource design. Teachers need to justify all activities in terms of attainment targets, so teaching materials need to fit within this framework. This is particularly significant for cross-curricular activities.
Teachers reported that interactive activities were the most appropriate methods of teaching health related issues, and the main classroom activities were discussion and role play, with some schools making links with art, language, environmental studies.
Smoking was presented to pupils as a matter of personal choice, with teachers taking an impartial stance. However, this placed teachers in a contradictory position as they were actually promoting a non-smoking message.
Teachers are not well placed to access recent research findings about smoking, and most role-play activities were based on an outdated notion of peer pressure. Children enacted scenes of coercion where they devised short-term strategies to avoid accepting cigarettes without losing face
Delivering tobacco education to children whose parents were smokers was seen to be problematic for a number of reasons. Children could become alarmed about their parents’ health prospects. Problems could be created if children became critical of their parents. Teachers were anxious to avoid eliciting parental complaint. For these reasons teachers often diluted the health messages they gave to those children. A small number of schools looked in detail at reasons why people smoke, in order to help children make sense of the conflicting messages they received.
At this age pupils did not feel that the long term health implications of smoking were relevant to themselves, but related more easily to messages about social implications or sporting prowess. Some teachers reported a gendered response to health messages. It was widely felt that the pupils found the concept of addiction to be incomprehensible.
Teachers adapted their teaching to suit their pupils, and were not looking for highly prescriptive resource materials. They had no desire to be resource-led, but wanted materials that could act as stimuli to interactive classroom activities, the details of which they would devise themselves. Factual information was useful as a teacher resource.
Outside agencies were often used to deliver part of their tobacco education, and were seen as having high impact on the pupils. Police, nurses, drama groups and a mobile interactive classroom were all sited as very useful additions to the normal teacher input.
These issues all had implications for future resource design. There is a need for close communication between schools and health promoters to ensure resources are easily available to teachers, and that teachers have access to recent research findings in this field.