Smoking not us
The educational material “Smoking? Not us!” is an original holistic prevention programme, as it is designed to intervene :
- to students in the last grades of primary school (D’, E’ & F’)
- the school management and the teachers’ association by adopting a “smoke-free school” policy; and
- to parents, whom it tries to involve in the programme by organising information meetings and activities (similar to those that children work on) that parents are asked to do at home.
The main purpose of the educational material is the prevention of smoking in primary school students. The specific objectives are as follows: The implementation of the programme is based on the social and personal skills model which aims to develop behaviours that promote psychosocial health. It makes use of experiential learning, which enables students to become actively involved in the acquisition of knowledge, to enhance their learning capacity, to become more responsible so as to form a shared experience that can lead to actions towards social changes in the school environment. The CAPNISM? NOT ME! was systematically evaluated during its pilot implementation on 1491 students both in terms of its pre-effectiveness and in terms of the implementation process. The findings from the evaluation highlighted its effectiveness and allowed us to improve the program so that we now have a reliable and valid smoking prevention program. The programme includes :
- 13 two-hour meetings for students
- 2 two-hour support sessions for students next year
- 2 information sessions for parents and 6 activities that parents take home and are asked to complete.
- Implementation of an introductory training seminar (2 days, 11 hours) for teachers, aiming at the understanding of basic concepts of the programme on the one hand and familiarisation with experiential learning techniques on the other hand.
- Supervision team for teachers, coordinated by staff of the “ELPIDA” Prevention Centre. The aim of this team will be to support teachers in the implementation of the educational material to students. The duration of each meeting will be 2 hours, depending on the number of participants. The total number of supervisory meetings will be determined with each group.
- Parallel application of the educational material of the programme by the teachers to the students(10 two-hour sessions).
The programme is the result of a collaboration between the Centres for the Prevention of Addictions and Promotion of Psychosocial Health of the Thessaloniki region (ELPIDA, ALFA Network, PYXIDA and SIRIOS), N. Rodopi (Orpheus) and Xanthi (Expression), the Organisation against Drugs (OKANA), the National Centre for Documentation and Information on Drugs (EpiPSY-EKTEPN), the 4th Health Region and the ANTH “Theagenio”
Information on the evaluation of the programme at the following link :
EVALUATION OF THE PILOT PROGRAMME