Alcohol and school

Citation

(1999), "Alcohol and school", Nutrition & Food Science, Vol. 99 No. 5. https://doi.org/10.1108/nfs.1999.01799eaf.004

Alcohol and school

The Portman Group has staged a series of lectures on controversial aspects of alcohol policy to mark its tenth anniversary. Janet Street-Porter, programme maker and broadcaster, gave the first of these lectures. These are some of the points she made.

When I grew up, drinking did not take place in our house. The odd sweet sherry might be consumed at Christmas from a bottle kept firmly in the sideboard for the rest of the year, but that was about it. Drink, like sex, was simply not discussed. At school sex education consisted of learning to draw the urinary-genital system for ‘O’ level human biology. If sex education was sketchy at school, discussion about drink and drugs was non-existent. We found out about all three by rumour, gossip and personal trial and error. The point of these reminiscences is that they took place in the early 1960s – but have things improved today?

In the intervening years there has been a social revolution. Drinking has gone from being the mysterious, secret pub-based male-led activity of my youth and become something that takes place in a whole variety of situations, by men and women and a lot of young people. I am going to talk about the best ways of engaging young people in a debate about alcohol. If it was not discussed in my youth, now I think it has to be. The reason why a dialogue about drink has to take place with the young is not to impose further regulations on their behaviour or to offer them any more rules and regulations than already exist, but to equip them with the relevant information, so they can decide for themselves how they wish to run their lives.

Images and versions of life with drink bombard young people today in a confusing and suffocating way. Turn on the TV and whole slabs of soap are structured round the pub and daily drinking. Alcohol has become a massive industry and advertising is a battle ground targeting the young as new cash rich consumers. At home parents return from the supermarket laden with bottles and cans. Drinking takes place in front of the TV and the children. But young children under 16 face a dilemma. Few parents willingly let them drink. It’s something you do when you’re older and even fewer parents are willing to discuss what alcohol does to you.

In a dream world Britain would be like France and Italy where wine is drunk with meals every day and children learn about it and try it out as a natural part of growing up and family life. But Britain isn’t part of the wine world. We are still predominantly a lager culture where most people drink for a good time and not as a digestive aid.

Young people today are growing up with parents who drink, role models who indulge in excessive behaviour and a non-stop series of images targeted directly at them. When young children are at primary school, their attitudes to drinking are more moral – they see it as stupid and disgusting. But by the time they’ve moved on to secondary school, other influences have come into play. Drinking is seen as sexy, part of a group, exciting and part of growing up.

Research shows that attitudes to drinking, and when people start to drink, are very much influenced by how much and how their parents drink. Surveys show that 68 per cent of nine to 11-year olds had tried alcohol and by the time they are 15, 80 per cent of young people will have been drunk. Statistics show that the proportion of teenagers who drink has not grown, but those who drink more each week and more at each drinking session has. This is a cause for concern. One in five 11 to 15-year olds in England and 37 per cent of 11 to 16-year olds in Wales drink every single week. In our society now, over 90 per cent of adults drink and children as young as five know about alcohol. Research also shows that people who are regular drinkers by 15 are more likely to have a drink problem in later life.

So how can we create a culture that encourages moderate consumption? We have to begin by talking to five year-olds at primary schools and to encourage discussion through play and performance regarding drink. We must give children a lot of information and five to 11-year olds can easily assimilate it. We have an opportunity to give them a basic life skill which is the chance to drink properly (or not if that is their choice) and not for the wrong reasons. Children should be encouraged to ask whatever they want to know about alcohol.

The process should continue at secondary schools, but now alcohol awareness education should take place more frequently, and at youth clubs as well as at school. I propose that educational schemes which appeal to young people be funded by the lottery and the alcohol industry. Alcohol education should be a compulsory part of the National Curriculum, separate from drug education. Each school should have a counsellor trained to talk to students about their attitudes to drink and problems when they arise. Teachers need to have a mandatory part of their training dedicated to a brief course on how to talk to the young about alcohol. We cannot let the current situation of ignorance, combined with peer pressure and media pressure, continue.

The best way to discuss alcohol with young people is surely through drama, role playing and discussion. Let them discover information via these routes and create an environment where the quest for knowledge is led by them and not by figures of authority. Surely it’s more productive to let them think they are creating the agenda for discussion and not vice versa. Provide them with the information about the strengths of various drinks and the positive as well as the negative effects of consumption. Don’t waste your energies wondering why young people drink. And don’t waste any energy trying to stop them. Instead try to undermine our culture of excess by substituting knowledge that encourages a desire to drink in moderation. Accept that bingeing is part of growing up: young people undergoing profound physical, mental and social pressures will always binge whether it is by playing computer games to excess, listening to loud music or drinking. The trick is to experiment – that is normal – but then move on to a way of behaving that does not damage yourself or other people.

Young people have told us emphatically that they want to know about alcohol, so we owe it to them to do the job properly. We need to end the current climate of ignorance and hypocrisy as soon as possible. Some parents think that because alcohol is legal abuse it is less serious than drug abuse. I disagree. Anything that causes physical and mental impairment, whether legal or illegal, needs to be explained properly. The danger with alcohol, unlike drugs, is that we are in danger of driving a legal substance underground by our reluctance to take the right steps to educate young consumers about the pleasures and pitfalls it can entail.

Finally, set up a national confidential telephone service for young people to discuss drink, funded by the industry itself and manned by properly trained staff. For every advertisement on our screens, free, confidential and realistic advice should be readily available to the young.