When teaching drug education, it’s not uncommon to be asked: “Why do some young people use drugs?” To answer this question, we might consider a lack of parental control or having parents who are drug users themselves. We might look at the influence of a peer group; it might be simple curiosity or a way of self-medicating an undiagnosed mental illness.

It’s a bit like asking why some students fail at school - there are lots of reasons and they’re often interconnected in complicated ways. It’s worth recognising that drug use isn’t just an issue for young people. You might ask yourself why you can’t face any classes before you’ve had your first coffee or how desperate you are for that monstrous glass of pinot when you get home from school on Friday… or Monday.

In the end, the most important thing is thinking about how drug education in schools can find solutions. Just as we can’t expect all of our students to get top grades in their exams, the goal of drug education isn’t necessarily to stop all kids using drugs.

It should be there to ensure that for those who do, it has the least impact on their lives.

Once upon a time, this was a deeply controversial position to take. Indeed, there are still a few heads and governing bodies who only want to hear the message that drugs are bad, full stop.

The reality, of course, is far more nuanced.

Drugs education has gone through a number of stages since its first appearance on the PSHE curriculum. Readers over a certain age will recall the “Just Say No” message of the Grange Hill kids in the 1980s. For a younger audience, this same abstinence model of drug education is espoused by the ludicrous figure of Mr Mackey in the US cartoon South Park, whose message begins and ends with “Drugs are bad… mmm’kay”.

Improving drugs education

In the 1990s, the approach switched to one of harm reduction, which recognised that despite what their parents and teachers said (and often because of what they said), some young people were still going to use drugs. The goal then became to help them to use them in the least harmful ways.

More recently, the most effective drugs education has come to favour a life skills and resilience approach. What this means, in essence, is that good drugs education doesn’t really have to be about drugs at all. Instead, this method tries to help young people to develop the skills to make smart choices when faced with tricky situations. Good drugs education lessons often revolve around different elements of metacognition, thinking about our thinking. They help young people to recognise that their actions have consequences. This doesn’t always come naturally to kids who often have trouble planning beyond the next 10 minutes.

That’s not to say that learning about drugs has no place in the lessons. Knowing some facts about what drugs are and how they affect you is a good first step to deciding if it’s something you want to put into your body.

One of the take-home messages is that in an unregulated industry, you can never really be sure what you’re taking at all - baking powder, detergent and ground-up laxatives all look pretty much like cocaine. For teachers, it’s helpful and reassuring to have a basic knowledge, to know your Spice from your monkey dust from your bath salts (not made up names, honestly).

Unlike the subjects taught day-to-day, in drugs education there’s a good chance some of the kids will know more than the teachers. It’s unrealistic to become an expert in pharmacology or jurisprudence to teach a good drugs education lesson, but it’s also unnecessary. Which is just as well, because in most schools, delivering drugs education falls to the PSHE staff, form teachers or just the person with a spare lesson on their timetable. The teacher’s role, as always, is to help their students to understand the issues and to think critically about them.

Drugs education remains vital for schools to deliver and to deliver effectively. Recent news stories about the “county lines” phenomenon suggest that drugs are still a hugely destructive issue for many young people. That’s not to say that there’s been a big upswing in drug use. In fact, most of the data tells us that drug use for young people is lower than it’s been for a long time (although by some measures starting to rise again). County lines represents a new business model in drug dealing, using vulnerable teenagers, often those in local authority care and lacking the skills to avoid getting involved. The need to equip young people with the social and psychological skills to recognise risky situations and learn strategies for dealing with them seems more important than ever.

In the end, what good drugs education will achieve is to get young people to think more, about drugs, yes, but crucially about all the choices they make in life, in their studies, in their relationships, for their future. Spending a little more time thinking is never a bad thing for any of us.

Callum Jacobs has taught in secondary schools for over 20 years and is now director of education at DEALS Training, a drug education training consultancy offering CPD to schools