Kilfinane school takes part in landmark teen alcohol study

Students at Kilfinane’s Scoil Pól have taken part in a landmark university study to understand alcohol education and behaviours of young teens.

More than 13,000 students, including pupils from eight secondary schools across Cork county, have to date participated in Drinkaware’s Junior Cycle Alcohol Education Programme (JC AEP) which was the subject of the three-year longitudinal study carried out by Maynooth University.

This significant study, for the first time, tracks first to third year students’ experiences of alcohol education in Ireland in real time.

Drinkaware, a national charity working to reduce and prevent alcohol misuse in Ireland, commissioned Maynooth University’s Centre for Mental Health and Community Research to investigate the programme’s effectiveness, in particular its primary prevention goal to delay the age of first drink.

The programme involves 8-10 lessons delivered on a weekly/fortnightly basis by the trained teacher and to date, 134 schools have undertaken the programme.

350+ students from 19 schools across the country took part in the evaluation that was conducted over a three-year period from 2018 to 2020.

The report found that as the students progressed through the JC AEP, the proportion who expressed no intention or interest in drinking, rose from 30% in first year to 54% in third year.

The findings also show that participation led to substantial and sustained improvements in students’ knowledge and understanding of alcohol when compared with pre-programme delivery data.

Students’ knowledge of the impact of alcohol on overall health and wellbeing increased substantially and progressively from 22% pre-programme to 50% in third year.

A similar increase was found regarding students who reported ‘knowing a lot’ about alcohol’s impact on mental health, which also doubled from 23% pre-programme to 46% in third year. Furthermore, nearly half (46%) of participating students identified the negative impact of alcohol on physical and mental health as a reason why teenagers do not drink.

EARLY ENGAGEMENT

Sheena Horgan, Drinkaware CEO spoke of the important lessons learned from the study.

“15 years of age is the average age of the first drink in Ireland. But average doesn’t tell the full story. This study shows how attitudes, and behaviours shift markedly across 13 to 15 year olds, first to third year, meaning alcohol education before this age is vital.

“Maynooth University’s rigorous and independent evaluation shows how programmes like Drinkaware’s JC AEP can make a significant contribution to the prevention/delay of underage drinking,” she said.

Professor Sinéad McGilloway, founder and director of the Centre for Mental Health and Community Research at Maynooth University’s Dept. of Psychology, said that the study found that education was a useful tool to combat drinking in childhood.

“To date, public policy on alcohol has primarily focused on older teenagers. However, our research clearly indicates that we need to engage with our children at a much earlier age.

“The collective findings of this study suggest that Drinkaware’s Alcohol Education Programme is a useful, feasible and high quality programme that is successfully engaging and empowering young people to develop sustained improvements in knowledge, awareness, understanding, confidence and appropriate decision-making skills around the consumption of alcohol.