The 13th World Conference on Tobacco OR Health

Objective: The importance of the school environment in establishing lifelong health behaviour patterns has been asserted by both academics and policy makers. With Welsh policy promoting investment in children's health for long-term population health gain, the school's potential to determine patterns of smoking behaviour is seen as key to reducing long-term smoking rates. Until recently, the attempt to understand the function of the school in influencing smoking has often overlooked the role of school policy despite the fact that such policies are central to how schools approach smoking. This work investigates variability in policy type and context, and explores whether these may be associated with smoking prevalence.

Methods: Teacher interviews were conducted in 46 of the 59 Welsh schools that participated in the 2001/2 Health Behaviour in School-aged Children (HBSC) study. From these interviews, factors relating to variation in smoking policy and its enforcement were identified. These were then reduced to indicator variables for analysis against pupil-level data on smoking levels from the HBSC study to assess whether this variation was associated with lower or higher adolescent smoking prevalence. The interview data adds some context to the interpretation of these results.

Results: Various elements of the wider school environment relating to policy and its implementation varied both within and between schools. These include policy type; format; rationale; surveillance of smoking misbehaviour; sanctions and undermining of policy. Underlying all of these were notions of the school ethos towards addressing smoking. Findings of the quantitative and qualitative analyses will be presented.