MODERN FAMILY
WHEN I was at school there was a girl who thought it was a good idea to smother herself in cooking oil instead of sun cream on one of the hottest days of the year.
Instead of treating her tan with soothing aftersun cream, the doctors were treating her skin for third degree burns.
Thankfully, our sun awareness has improved in the past 20 years, but it seems there is still some way to go.
Sunburn during childhood can more than double the risk of that person developing skin cancer, one of the most common cancers in Britain, in later life with 2,500 people dying from the disease annually.
A report out for Sun Awareness Week has found that one in five youngsters are returning home with scorched skin because teachers are not allowed to apply sun cream.
But it can’t all be the teachers fault. Learning how to apply sun cream properly is one those life skills that should be taught along with basic cooking skills, manners and how to handle money.
And it shouldn’t be just down to the teachers - parents and children themselves can help.
Some schools invite parents in to apply sun cream at lunchtime, but when most work, this is not really a solution.
My children hate putting on sun cream, but if they are told by their teachers to apply it during a supervised session, and see their friends doing it, they are more likely to join in and to do it properly.
After a 10-year-old girl suffered severe sunburn during sports day at her Swansea school in 2011, there where calls or mandatory ‘sun safety’ policies for schools.
Guidelines provided then said there is no reason whatsoever why teachers should not supervise the application, perhaps with the assistance of the school nurse or indeed parents who attend on a pre-arranged rota system.
They also recommend schools run awareness campaigns to alert children to the harms of too much sun exposure.
It worked in Australia where the iconic Slip-Slop-Slap campaign during the 1980s became internationally recognised and the two most common forms of skin cancer in the country decreased.
Okay, it’s pretty easy to laugh about any parallels with the Australian climate but the evidence is clear that we have more than enough sun during the average British summer to cause long-lasting damage.
Using a catchy jingle and a dancing seagull, Australians were urged to slip on long-sleeved clothing, slop on sunscreen and slap on a hat.
It was so successful it became absorbed, like a sun block, into the Australian psyche and 25 years of experience shows that public education programmes can reduce sunburn, which in turn will reduce skin cancer rates in the future.
So let’s all do a bit more Slip-SlopSlapping.