Preventative Drink Driving for Secondary Schools

“Awareness is like the sun. When it shines on things, they are transformed.”
Thich Nhat Hanh

Reducing the Risk of Teenage Drink Driving

Teenage drink driving can have severe lifelong consequences for young people. We would like to reduce the risk of this occurring, so we have developed 10 lessons that can be delivered as part of the Personal and Social Education within secondary schools.

The 10 lessons have been developed using the Curriculum for Excellence, Health & Wellbeing, Experiences and Outcomes including benchmarks for teachers to assess learning. We would need to deliver a 1 full training session with your guidance teachers to enable them to facilitate the learning within the 10 lessons.

The structure of the 10 lessons are detailed below.

Lesson 1

Provide visual examples of how media marketing influences young people’s attitudes and behaviour.

Lesson 2

What is alcohol? Understand units of alcohol and how it is processed in the body. Include knowledge on recommended alcohol limits.

Lesson 3

How does alcohol consumption affect physical and psychological functioning, health in the short and long term.? How does alcohol affect the developing adolescent brain and mental health?

Lesson 4

Use Cognitive Behavioural Theoretical Framework in understanding how prescribed medication can improve health and decision making and how alcohol and illegal drugs negatively impact on physical and mental health and decision making. Consider the consequences of using prescribed and illegal drugs when driving under the current road traffic legislation.

Lesson 5

Using real life cases where young people have been convicted of drink and drug driving and they discuss the negative impact their poor decision making has had on their lives.

Lesson 6

Use Scottish statistics, the Icelandic Youth Study and Portugal de-criminalisation of substances to encourage further exploration of international alcohol and substance misuse.

Lesson 7

Use case studies depicting real life events that could have a positive or negative outcome depending on choices made.

Lesson 8

Understand a range of issues that arise from alcohol and substance misuse and identify local and national support agencies.

Lesson 9

This provides a session to re-visit any parts of session 1- 8 that were not covered in as much depth as you would have liked or to catch up on parts missed.

Lesson 10

This provides a session to summarise the main learning points as indicated in the benchmarks. A quiz could be set to demonstrate learning point form each session.