What do they need to know?
Young people need to know:
- the facts about the laws relating to alcohol, and about how alcohol can affect the health – especially in relation to young people. Knowing the facts allows them to make informed choices about drinking alcohol.
- how to resist peer pressure to drink alcohol under age.
- how their behaviour with their peers where alcohol is concerned can affect themselves, their friends and the wider community.
- The accurate social norm for under-age drinking. A social norm is a belief about the attitudes and behaviours that are considered normal, acceptable or expected in a particular social context. Many young people drink under age because they believe everyone else is, which is not actually the case – only 17% of 15-16 year-olds in the UK regularly drink alcohol – which means around 80% don’t drink alcohol regularly or at all.
You can see a table showing how each worksheet and online activity covers these four key learning objectives.
Summary of Talk About Alcohol resources
You can also see tables showing ways of combining the worksheets into teaching programmes which cover all four key learning objectives.
*Unless specified otherwise all statistics are taken from the pilot research undertaken by Research Works Ltd. in March 2006 for the EFRD’s Talk About Alcohol project. Students aged 11-16 at 48 schools in the UK, Spain and the Czech Republic were surveyed.
