A NEW scheme is helping to prevent Clackmannanshire youngsters from becoming involved in “risky behaviours”.

The Most of Us school initiative, between NHS Forth Valley and local schools, is hoping to achieve its aim by challenging young people's perceptions about how common these activities are amongst their classmates.

The “social norms” approach, originally researched and developed in the US, has recently been adapted for use within secondary schools across the Forth Valley.

Theresa Campbell, lead health promotion officer at NHS Forth Valley, said: “This is a simple, yet really effective way of preventing young people from getting involved in risky activities such as smoking, drinking alcohol and taking drugs. There is also enormous scope to apply this approach to all sorts of behaviours.

“It also helps reduce harm in those young people who are already involved in these activities because working with them, before risk behaviours become established, helps motivate them to make the decision to change.”

The project involves asking pupils if they have been drinking alcohol, using drugs or smoking in the past month, and then asks students to record how many of their classmates they think have taken part in these activities during the same period.

The youngsters then get together to analyse the resulting data, which relies entirely on their honesty – usually, the students tend to overestimate how many of their classmates are actually taking part in these risky behaviours. It is said the data proves the majority of young people are not actually drinking, smoking or taking drugs.

Three interactive lessons then follow on, focusing on helping the pupils understand why reality can be very different from their perception and how this can affect the choices they make.

NHS says participating in the project has been shown to prevent and reduce harm as the majority of those not involved in these activities feel less peer pressure to do so in the future.

And those who had been involved may have been doing so believing they were no different from anyone else, which can explain the “significant drop” in these behaviours when the survey was repeated with the same pupils six months later.

The most recent evaluation, which covered 84 third year pupils aged 14 and 109 second year pupils aged 13 at three secondary schools in the Forth Valley, showed that among the minority who were engaged in risky behaviours, many decided to stop doing so.

Smoking rates fell by 64 per cent, from 11 to four; drinking alcohol fell by 45 per cent, from 20 to 11; out of the eight who used cannabis one stopped; and out of the two who used new psychoactive substances, or so called legal highs, one stopped.

The initiative was originally trialled with first, second and third year students at Alva Academy, Denny, Falkirk, Wallace and Balfron High Schools and is now being rolled out to all secondary schools across the Forth Valley in partnership with Barnardos, local schools and school-based police officers.

NHS says interest has also been expressed in using the programme within other settings, including colleges.