“(The SHEU survey) was very, very useful. It gave us reassurance we weren’t missing a trick. For example not many pupils in the sample year groups were taking illegal drugs, which re-enforced our opinions. But the survey also raised issues and flagged some things up. We discovered that some of our girls weren’t eating enough – the percentage of girls in our school not eating lunch the day before the survey was higher than the county average. There were other concerns too, specifically around cigarettes, alcohol and attendance.
The school used this data and took a number of actions to address it. More female peer mentors were put in place and the school asked NEXUS (the Extended Schools service) for help, so they developed a programme for girls which addressed their eating patterns, healthy eating, sex education and self-esteem issues.
We ran an anti-bullying group for Year 9 as a preventative measure, based upon data provided by our current Year 10 students.
The travel data revealed that a high number of pupils took the car to school so we involved the BIKE-IT scheme who ran assemblies, brought in their bikes (including one with a pedal-powered smoothie maker!), and raised awareness of health and green issues.
The information about how happy the students were with their lives raised some concerns as far fewer girls were as happy as the boys, so work was done around developing aspirations, role-models and self-esteem."
Trends - Alcohol
Attitudes to drinking 1983-2001
This report is to be updated and is currently not available for sale.
The following is a summary of the report.
When looking over these many years of figures, we find that young people in recent years are...
* less likely to drink alcohol on at least one day in the last seven (in 2001, 49% of 14-15 year olds and around 26% of 12-13 year olds reported drinking and the majority drank on just one day in the last seven)
* less likely to drink beer, lager, cider, wine and shandy in the previous week (in 2001, 34% of 14-15 year old males reported drinking at least 1 pint of beer 'the last seven days')
* less likely to drink but, on average, those that drink, drink more (in 2001, 21% of the 14-15 year old male drinkers drank 5 or more pints of beer compared with 12% drinking the same amount in 1991)
* more likely to drink pre-mixed spirits - alcopops (in 2001, 25% of 14-15 year olds reported drinking alcopops in the last 7 days)
* more likely, if you are a 14-15 year old female, to drink spirits in the last 7 days (in 2001, 20% of this group reported drinking spirits in the last week and, of these, 25% drank 5 or more measures)
...when compared with figures from previous years.