Health Education Research, Vol. 18, No. 3, 329-340,
June 2003
© 2003 Oxford University Press
Ifs, maybes and butts: factors influencing staff enforcement of pupil smoking restrictions
MRC Social and Public Health Sciences Unit, University of Glasgow, Glasgow G12 8RZ, UK. E-mail: jackie.gordon{at}phis.csa.scot.nhs.uk
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Abstract |
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Levels of pupil smoking are reported to be associated with the extent to which school staff consistently enforce smoking restrictions. Little is known, however, about factors which might motivate or discourage staff from doing so. Following analysis of interviews conducted with 27 members of school personnel purposively selected from two Scottish secondary schools serving relatively deprived communities, this paper identifies various issues that hinder staff intervention when confronted with pupil smoking. Both schools had no-smoking policies. In each, staff assumed or understood that smoking within the buildings was forbidden, yet were unsure about how far the bans extended. While the risk of fire in the school buildings prompted staff to intervene when smoking was witnessed indoors, where this risk was absent, decisions were largely context dependent or motivated by personal and professional values. Concerns about staff–pupil relationships, attention to pupils’ wider welfare, lack of authority and staff levels of discomfort were salient issues inhibiting intervention. Implications for smoking policies and their enforcement are discussed. The concept of the Health Promoting School is considered in the light of the findings and inherent tensions highlighted.
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Introduction |
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Despite recent statistics suggesting a fall in the proportion of teenagers smoking regularly in the UK (Goddard and Higgins, 2000
; Boreham and Shaw, 2001), the numbers who do so remain considerable. For instance, Goddard and Higgins report that by age 15, 68% have tried a cigarette and 23% smoke regularly (Goddard and Higgins, 2000). It is likely that many of these will continue to smoke, the majority of smokers starting their habit in their teenage years (Thomas et al., 1998). Such figures signal the need for more concerted and effective strategies targeting young people as part of a drive to address this single most preventable cause of morbidity and mortality. Correspondingly, young people’s smoking has been identified as a national priority (Welsh Office, 1998; Department of Health, 1998, 1999; Scottish Office Department of Health, 1999).
One expedient approach for targeting large numbers of young people is through their schools and there is a long tradition of health agendas being progressed through such channels (NHS Centre for Reviews and Dissemination, 1999). Increasingly, policy makers and practitioners subscribe to the notion that health issues should be addressed not only through the health education curriculum, but via whole-school approaches (Department of Education and Employment, 1999; Scottish Office Department of Health, 1999) as encapsulated in the concept of the Health Promoting School (HPS), a basic tenet of which is a supportive physical and social environment (WHO, 1993; Bowker and Tudor-Smith, 1996; Crosswaite et al., 1996; Health Education Board for Scotland, Health Promotion Wales, Health Education Authority [England], Health Promotion Agency for Northern Ireland, 1996). More specifically, a central feature of the HPS in many countries is that it should be smoke-free (Kannas and Schmidt, 2001). Certainly, as lessons imparted in health education can be counteracted or contradicted by observations and experiences in the school playground where smoking by peers may be commonplace (Griesbach and Currie, 2000), one crucial strand to ensuring a smoke-free environment is the enforcement of a no-smoking stance or policy. The implementation of such a policy is considered to be an organizational measure that can serve to reinforce and support teachers’ health promotion activity (Tubman and Vento, 2001), whereas the absence of such policies may convey the hidden message that smoking is acceptable (Stead et al., 1996). Furthermore, consistent with the well-accepted finding that peer groups exercise salient influences on decisions of the young to smoke (Tyas and Pederson, 1998), it has been argued that stringent policy implementation reduces the visibility of smoking models and ‘reinforces a non-smoking norm as standard behavior’ [(Alexander et al., 2001), p. 28]. Ideally, implementation of such smoking bans should be part of a school’s wider smoking policy (which might also address issues such as integrating smoking-related topics into the curriculum, supporting those wishing to quit, etc.). Nevertheless, some have argued that capitalizing on the use of school rules regarding pupil smoking on school premises offers an important and relatively easy way forward for schools (Lantz et al., 2000; Moore et al., 2001), and communicates a message that school staff will act within their jurisdiction to address any smoking among those pupils in their charge (West and Foulds, 1999).
As schools represent a common arena for adolescents’ smoking (Kannas and Schmidt, 2001), a school policy or commitment to being smoke-free would therefore seem to be a laudable venture and intuitively plausible mechanism by which to reduce pupil smoking. As smoke-free policies ideally extend beyond the school hours and the school gates (Kannas and Schmidt, 2001), their potential to impact could be significant.
Attempts have been made to identify whether smoking policies do actually make a difference to levels of pupil smoking. Evidence on the effectiveness of such policies has been described as ‘mixed’ [(Moore et al., 2001), p. 117] and ‘suggestive, but still equivocal’ [(Flay, 2000), p. 864]. Reasons for this doubt include studies’ failure to uncover direction of causality and reported associations being restricted to level of consumption rather than number of smokers [e.g. (Pentz et al., 1989; Chaloupka and Grossman, 1996)].
In part, uncertainty over the associations between policies and pupils’ smoking may also reflect variations in the extent to which policies have been successfully and consistently implemented. Three recent studies support this argument. On the basis of cross-sectional data drawn from 80 secondary schools in Wales, Moore et al. report lower daily and weekly smoking prevalence in schools characterized by consistent enforcement of pupils’ smoking restrictions (Moore et al., 2001). The authors are careful to stress that it is inappropriate to assume a causal explanation and also remind us of the potential for reverse causality such that schools for which smoking is less of a problem may find it easier to successfully pursue a rigorous (no smoking) stance. Their study is important, however, for demonstrating that our understanding of the effectiveness of policies may be furthered by consideration of the extent to which they are comprehensively implemented and enforced. Similarly, although Griesbach et al. found no significant association between pupils’ perceptions of levels of (pupil) smoking and the presence of a school policy on pupil smoking in 77 Scottish secondary schools (Griesbach et al., 2002), they also found that the enforcement of smoking policies was associated with lower levels of (pupil) perceived smoking. Conversely, those schools characterized by their inconsistency in relation to the enforcement of smoking restrictions, within and outwith school premises, had higher pupil reported rates of (pupil) smoking in these locations. Finally, in an American study involving over 200 schools the investigators concluded that smoking bans in schools have a protective effect on teenage smoking only when strongly enforced (Wakefield et al., 2000). The implication of these findings is clear. What is important is not merely the presence (or absence) of a policy, but rather the extent to which pupil smoking restrictions are consistently enforced.
In Scotland there is no national legislation outlawing pupil smoking either within the school buildings or within their wider environs. In practice, pupil smoking is banned in all schools (Goddard and Higgins 1999), although school management exercise discretionary powers in their enforcement of such bans. What factors influence the extent to which school staff enforce these? Surprisingly, this seems to be an unexplored area, with key questions remaining unanswered. For instance, how do school staff view their roles and responsibilities in relation to the enforcement of smoking bans? Do they consider that they have a duty to intervene when confronted with pupil smoking? Are there circumstances which render such behaviour more or less likely? Do staff even want to tackle smoking in the first place? By discussing data obtained from staff interviews, carried out as part of the MRC-funded Teenage Health in School (THiS) study1, we aim to answer such questions.
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Methods |
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Interviews were conducted with school staff in two comprehensive secondary schools serving populations known to be relatively disadvantaged on the basis of the West of Scotland 11–16 Study (Sweeting and West, 2000
). Both schools were located in the Central Clydeside conurbation (this includes Greater Glasgow and surrounding areas)—one serving predominantly urban neighbourhoods, the other both industrial and rural communities. School rolls were around 1400 and 1100 respectively.
Staff members holding diverse roles and responsibilities were selected for interview: two refused, a janitor in one school and a guidance teacher in the other, and in both cases an alternative was interviewed. Twenty-seven school staff were interviewed (13 in one school and 14 in the other), and these comprised members of the senior management team (SMT) including the head teachers in each school, teachers with and without designated responsibilities for health, support staff, and school nurses (see Table I).
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One-to-one interviews were conducted (by J. G. or K. M. T.) in private rooms on or near school premises. Procedures for protecting anonymity and confidentiality were explained prior to interview, and with permission all interviews were recorded and subsequently fully transcribed. Interviews were semi-structured, involving questions on attitudes to, and personal behaviours in relation to, issues key to the HPS concept including the enforcement of smoking restrictions on pupils. Full transcripts were imported into NVivo version 1.2 (NVivo, 2000
) to facilitate qualitative thematic analysis. In this paper, to protect anonymity, issues raised and quotations from head teachers will be subsumed under the category ‘SMT’, ‘teachers’ will be used to denote those with responsibility for maths, English, physical education (PE) and biology, and ‘key informants’. Office and auxiliary staff, and school nurses will all be referred to as ‘support staff’. Some SMT members held pastoral responsibilities and their designation will be shown as ‘guidance teacher’ in those instances where the point being made is deemed relevant to this aspect of their remit. |
Findings |
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The schools’ policies: status, scope and sanctions
Both schools were, at face value and according to their respective SMTs, signed up to a policy that prohibited pupil smoking in the school.
There is a clear statement if you like which is if a pupil is found smoking inside the school building they are suspended for 10 school days... It’d be very tempting for me to say my responsibilities stop at the school gates, it’s not actually the way we do it... [SMT, male, non-smoker, school A]
Our attitude here is that ‘you (pupils) don’t smoke, end of story. If you are going to smoke, it’s to be nowhere near the school’. [SMT, male, non-smoker, school B]
These two quotes suggest that the official stance taken by the schools was that pupils were not to smoke within the school buildings and the accounts of other members of the SMT unequivocally supported this notion. However, because within each school, SMT members held different views about the physical boundaries of their responsibilities in relation to smoking and because the schools did not have written policies on pupils’ smoking that we could check, it was not possible to establish with any certainty whether the official stance was restricted to the school buildings, the wider school premises or even to the neighbouring streets. While in each school, one member of the SMT stressed that responsibilities did not cease at the schools’ doors, reporting instances where pupils had been disciplined over smoking witnessed in the playground and outside school premises in the neighbouring streets, it was unclear whether such intervention was expected by the school policies or simply desirable. In fact, as interviews with subordinate members of staff also revealed a certain fuzziness over the scope of their school’s ban (e.g. whether or not they extended beyond the school buildings or school grounds), the intervention of the aforementioned members of the SMT may have been motivated by personally held values rather than being prompted by a specific and explicit dictate of the school. This is a highly plausible explanation. One of the SMT members who intervened outwith the school premises stated that he took pupil smoking very seriously due to losing a relative through smoking-related illness. Later in this paper we shall revisit the fact that decisions about how to behave in the face of pupil smoking were sometimes motivated by personally held values, and various perceptions concerning roles and responsibilities in relation to the enforcement of the policies. Not only did individualistic perspectives underpin decisions regarding the enforcement of smoking bans, within each school staff accounts exhibited considerable diversity. In particular, they failed to reveal a clear school-level picture as to how smoking policies operated in practice in the two studied. In each school, such inter-staff diversity not only occurred across different staff categories (e.g. the support staff as compared with the SMT), but also within these groupings as well (e.g. within each school’s SMT, there emerged qualitative differences in attitudes and behaviours).
We have already reported that the understanding of the official stance of the schools was unclear: consensus was lacking as to how far the smoking bans extended (i.e. whether or not they stretched beyond the school buildings). Perhaps one would expect that head teachers’ activities would exemplify the official stance of their respective schools; however, we were unable to confidently accept their testimonies as the ‘full story’. For both schools there were discrepancies between how head teachers professed to act when faced with pupils’ smoking and what other staff members reported as happening in reality. In one school, a member of the SMT talked of his proactive ‘raids’ on smoking hot spots in the playground and at the school gates, yet several of his staff (teachers and support staff) intimated that such activity was sporadic rather than a consistent feature of his approach, and that the sanctions he imposed varied over time and according to the individual pupils concerned. In the other school, a member of the SMT claimed that if a pupil was caught smoking, parents would be informed, but the accounts of other staff were at odds with this.
Such discrepancies, together with the considerable inter-staff diversity in each of the two schools, suggest a lack of within-school agreement in the interpretation and enforcement of smoking bans. Because of this lack of intra-school coherence and because staff accounts in one school were not qualitatively different from those in the other, for the purposes of this paper, the data from the two schools are combined. We present staff accounts thematically to indicate emergent factors that served to inhibit their enforcement of smoking restrictions on pupils. Broadly these concern issues relating to place, time and person. In this latter category we report staff views relating to the nature of desirable staff–pupil relationships, considerations regarding their personal safety, difficulties surrounding staff authority and perceptions over their efficacy in impacting on pupil smoking.
Issues regarding the enforcement of smoking restrictions
Location
All interviewees understood or assumed that pupil smoking within the buildings was forbidden. As this behaviour was seen to constitute a fire hazard, this ban was viewed and accepted as a sensible precautionary measure. When asked how pupil smoking indoors would be addressed, interviewees reported that they and their colleagues would respond by reprimanding pupils, usually resorting to disciplinary procedures. It seemed that this response was prompted because fire, rather than smoking, was the risk:
I take a much more severe view and I think the whole school does about smoking inside the building. And to some extent even inside in the toilets because of the risk of fire. Em. But that’s more the risks posed by smoking rather than dealing with smoking as an issue. [SMT, smoker, male]
To be quite truthful, number one is the safety aspect of it. There’s more than themselves to think about when it comes to lighting cigarettes and matches and whatever else in the school. [SMT, non-smoker, male]
This is not to say that fire safety was the only spur to staff activity, but the point to be made here is that as a general pattern, an elevated perception of fire risk was associated with high levels of staff responsibility and enforcement activity. There were two notable exceptions to this. One SMT member reported that his behaviour towards pupil smoking was not situation dependent, describing the strident and proactive measures he took to catch pupils smoking outside the school grounds, and to discipline them for this behaviour. The other exception was a support staff member whose motivation to take a firm line on pupil smoking indoors stemmed not from worries about safety, but rather from a personal fear about being reprimanded by teaching staff or the SMT if she ignored such behaviour.
In contrast to the assertive approach adopted within the school buildings, where smoking occurred in the playground there was a tendency for staff to turn a blind eye. Where smoking occurred beyond the school gates, further diminution of staff activity seemed likely as most interviewees admitted that they would take a lenient attitude, viewing this behaviour to be outwith the school’s responsibility. Therefore, perceived responsibility and direct action were strongest when smoking was witnessed within the school buildings, and became progressively diluted when witnessed in the playground and beyond the school gates.
Time
The fact that the time at which pupils smoke is integrally related to the location meant that when smoking was witnessed outwith school hours, staff members were less likely to say that they should, or would, take action: as smoking outwith school hours also tended to take place beyond the confines of the school buildings, staff members’ sense of responsibility to intervene was further diluted. Furthermore, staff members’ jurisdiction out of school hours was more likely to be challenged than was the case if they reprimanded a pupil for smoking during the school day.
Staff–pupil relations
The enforcement of smoking restrictions was considered to be inconsistent with the nature of the relationships many staff members wished to have with pupils. There were a number of issues pertaining to this.
First, staff members’ personally held or professional values seemed to be related to their perceived role and likely reactions to pupil smoking. Where staff favoured a democratic or tolerant approach in their dealings with pupils, they were less likely to report that they would intervene. For those five staff members who, during the course of their interview, disclosed that they smoked, a tolerant view to pupil smoking was evident. In fact, one interviewee explicitly cited his own smoking as a reason for this tolerance:
The discouraging of pupil smoking as such I take a tolerant attitude. But that’s because I take a tolerant attitude within my own life as well... I can understand if pupils want to light up outside the school gates or after 3:30. I’m not going to go up and create a kind of two-facedness hypocritical attitude by being hard on them but easy on myself. [SMT, smoker, male]
However, such a liberal view was not exclusively the domain of smoking staff: many non-smokers, including those who said they were vehemently opposed to smoking, also favoured a non-interventionist approach as exemplified by the quote below:
I: You said you didn’t like that stereotype of the teacher running behind the shed to check up on kids smoking. What is it you don’t like about that stereotype?
R: It’s interfering, it’s punitive, you can translate that as you like but teachers like that are a pain in the arse. [Teacher, non-smoker, male]
This last quote not only reflects a distaste for a disciplinarian and interventionist style, it also suggests a concern about self-presentation, a consideration highlighted by others too. Such concerns about their image, specifically how pupils would view them, emerged as the second factor inhibiting some teaching staff from being at all proactive in dealing with pupil smoking:
You want to be actively dissuasive to people who would eh, would smoke or whatever but you don’t want to be, you know holier than thou, ‘I am Flanders from The Simpsons’2 as well, you know...it’s like being the real person again, you need to be something to do with them... [Teacher, smoker, male]
In the account above, the teacher expresses the sentiment that he does not want to be seen as someone who pontificates over health behaviours. By wanting to project the persona of a ‘real person’, this teacher envisages that he will better connect with his pupils. This attention to the quality of the staff–pupil relationship emerged as the third interpersonal consideration discouraging teacher intervention. As this relationship was viewed as the basis for their role as effective educator or empathic guidance teacher, many prioritized pupil–staff relations over tackling smoking:
You don’t learn to manage them [pupils] by creating lots of rules and making sure that you enforce them. You manage them by establishing the relationship and working with the child, not against the child, and through that relationship to an understanding that there is a way of working together which is in both our interests. And that would be my attitude towards smoking. [SMT, smoker, male]
I shouldn’t be a disciplinarian, I shouldn’t be that. I should be pastoral and caring. [Guidance teacher, non-smoker, female]
It would appear then, that invoking school sanctions was seen to conflict with the values and interaction styles favoured by many members of the teaching staff, including those with senior management and guidance responsibilities.
Pupil welfare
Some staff accounts suggested that they were deterred from taking a hard line on pupil smoking because of their wider (holistic) attention to pupil welfare: without prior knowledge of individual ‘histories’, some opined that disciplining pupils over smoking may be inappropriate or overly harsh in view of their particular circumstances:
...the pupils’ lives can be so complicated and me just coming in there and giving them a row for smoking might be so trivial compared to what’s going on in their house. Whether, you know, they’re trying to cope with a mother who’s alcoholic or whatever, you know. If I come in and just go, ‘Boom!’ you know, ‘You’re getting a row for this’, that might just destroy their whole day... [Guidance teacher, non-smoker, female]
Although welfare considerations were a common feature of the accounts given by those with a responsibility for guidance, some other teaching staff also identified that these could discourage them from intervening:
I wouldn’t have done that (reported boy for smoking) but just the wee boy that he is, he’s a poor wee soul anyway so I just chatted to him while I was waiting on everybody else to get ready. [Teacher, non-smoker, female]
Issues such as pupil low self-esteem, unhappiness and personal problems, and not wanting to be responsible for a pupil being punished, were also mentioned as factors influencing enforcement activity.
Staff safety issues
Concerns regarding the staff member’s own personal safety or comfort inhibited intervention over smoking, such concerns being more frequently expressed in relation to pupils who were unknown to the staff member and/or where smoking took place outside school hours or the immediate environs of the school. There was a view, more frequently expressed by female members of staff (both teaching and support), that challenging or cautioning a pupil about smoking may evoke a response that is physically or verbally aggressive:
There’s this teacher, a colleague, and he was driving out the school after 4 [p.m.] one night, and he saw some pupils smoking, and he wound down the window and said something to them, and they spat at him. I think I wouldn’t want to get involved. [Guidance teacher, smoking status unknown, female]
Again (as with pupil welfare considerations), lack of personal knowledge of the young people concerned could conflate worries about intervening:
If they don’t know you, you’re more at risk, like a stranger approaching them... [Support staff member, non-smoker, female]
The prospect of confronting pupils who were so often seen to spend time hanging about with a larger group was viewed as risky and ill advised. Such safety considerations did not feature in the accounts of the SMT. While this latter finding is likely to reflect the authority conferred because of their elevated status, it should be noted that all SMT staff interviewed were male.
Lack of authority
Some staff highlighted the lack of authority they felt when trying to enforce a no-smoking policy and various factors served to undermine their position. The first was that their own authority could be compromised by a lack of support further up the line management structure (and in the illustrative account below, this could in turn be motivated by a manager’s or colleague’s commitment to the wider welfare of the pupil concerned):
I’ve given people into bother and given punishment exercises in the past where I’ve actually caught them red handed. And they’re not doing a punishment exercise. Why not? Because ‘you never caught me smoking, so you can’t say I was smoking’, and ‘my ma knows I smoke’. It’s like plea bargaining, you know, and not only that, I have seen this before, kids being formed [cautioned as part of disciplinary procedures] for being in possession of cigarettes, and the guidance teacher3 has come up and said ‘what about maybe making it a bit less official...because if he gets another form he’ll no (not) be able to go to the whatever’, you know, what can you do? [Teacher, smoker, male]
The second issue relating to staff authority was that pupils themselves may refuse to accept the instruction of a staff member: there was a view (based both on actual experiences and conjecture) that efforts to address smoking would be met with pupil derision and when the smoking occurred outside the school premises pupils were perceived as likely to convey a blatant disregard for staff’s capacity to wield appropriate authority. Although not exclusively, this situation emerged more frequently in the accounts given by support staff (e.g. cleaners, office staff):
But as I say, we cannot do it when they’re outside. You know, talking about it, if they’re outside, if they’re standing outside... they’re just going to tell me, ‘you’re nothing to do with me’, you know they’re not in the school, do you know what I mean. [Support staff, non-smoker, female]
They would gie you dog’s abuse [laughs] and tell you ‘mind your own business, we’re no in the school, we’re outwith the school grounds’. You could say to them ‘I know your name and Mr so and so’ll be having a word with you at such and such a time’ but they just go like that, [shrugs] ‘so?’. [Support staff, ex-smoker, female]
In the latter example, the staff member professed to know the pupil’s name, but very often this was not the case, further disempowering staff (including teachers) to take action.
Perceived ineffectiveness
Nearly every interviewee expressed the view that if pupils want to smoke then they will and there was little that an individual staff member or the school itself could do to prevent this behaviour:
It’s this kind of apathy, you just kind of accept it, if they’re going to do it, they’re going to do it. [Guidance teacher, non-smoker, female]
I really do not feel that a school or even a local authority can do anything about smoking. I think smoking is something that really needs big sort of campaigns about it, and it’s something that will be addressed by sort of national government fiscal policies more than anything else. [SMT, non-smoker, male]
For many, there was a view that all schools could do was relocate the smoking, not eradicate it:
....if they go out and patrol schools to stop them smoking, they’ll go somewhere else, they’ll go further afield. And that’s no use. [Support staff, non-smoker, female]
The influence that a school could exert was seen to be minimal compared with that of parents, peers, community values, the image of smoking, etc. The bottom line expressed by most was that schools are unlikely to be successful in bringing about massive changes in pupils smoking and health behaviours more generally:
We want to change the value system of 1300 people. I mean not even governments can do that. Not even totalitarian governments can do that, you know. [SMT, non-smoker, male]
Allied to the impotence that staff felt in the face of changing pupils’ smoking, several stressed the enormous burden they felt as increasingly high expectations were placed on schools, in general, and teachers, in particular:
I think too much is expected of the school...cos we have to do everything, not only to sort them out academically, sort them out emotionally, sort them out socially, everything. Sort them out healthwise in every respect and frankly we’re only teachers and we’re only human. So the cynical bit of me would say no because we can’t do everything, we really can’t do everything and the wider community maybe expects too much of the school. Which let’s face it, we were never really trained for in the first place. [Teacher, smoking status unknown, female]
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Discussion |
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Staff highlighted a number of issues that either by themselves, or in combination, reduce the likelihood of the individuals concerned enforcing smoking restrictions on the secondary school-aged pupils with whom they have contact. Before drawing conclusions and reflecting on their implications, it is worth noting some potential methodological limitations of this research.
First, the interviewees were not necessarily representative of school staff in general: the selection of staff members was driven by an attempt to capture diverse views rather than ones which were ‘typical’ for the school or of staff more widely. Second, the fact that the schools were serving relatively deprived communities was likely to have shaped the staff members’ experiences, expectations and perceptions; insight into the perspectives of staff in other types of schools may differ. Third, as the focus of analysis was on the extent to which staff enforced smoking restrictions on pupils, wider activity in relation to health education/health promotion (including curricular activities and the nurturing of a positive ethos) has not been reported here. It is important to remember that a smoking ban (and its enforcement) should ideally be only one aspect of an integrated school smoking policy (West and Foulds, 1999).
Notwithstanding these caveats, the findings highlight potential obstacles facing schools in their attempts to enforce no-smoking policies.
It is unsurprising perhaps that where staff saw pupils smoking influenced the likelihood of them intervening. Our findings are consistent with those of Griesbach et al. (Griesbach et al., 2002) in showing that staff were more likely to enforce a smoking ban inside the school buildings than in the playground/outdoor areas. Analysis of the staff accounts here indicates why this may be the case: motivated by concerns about lives being put at risk through fire (and with greater authority than outside), staff were more likely to intervene within, than beyond, the confines of the school. Thus, staff explained their behaviour by reference to pragmatic considerations. When smoking took place outside the fabric of the buildings, staff could not provide a similarly non-pejorative rationale for their intervention: any attempts to get pupils to extinguish cigarettes would largely rely on implicit or explicit disapproval of their behaviour, rather than being backed up by clearly communicated rules banning smoking.
What are the implications of restricting the enforcement of smoking bans to the immediate school buildings? It has been argued that smoking may just be relocated: within-school smoking bans can often encourage pupils to move outwith the premises in order to smoke during the school day (Kannas and Schmidt, 2001). In this study we have seen that when smoking was seen outside the school environs, many staff reported that they were reticent to intervene. It would therefore seem that smoking bans that are restricted to the school buildings seriously diminish the potential to impact upon the prevalence of pupil smoking or, indeed, levels of consumption. It seems plausible that the impact of smoking bans will be greater where these extend to playground areas and are backed up by attempts to encourage pupils to remain within the school environment during the school day. It is possible that members of staff holding a personal ‘value’ to reduce pupil smoking might welcome opportunities to capitalize on unambiguously expressed smoking bans that extend to schools’ wider environs as objective justification for their intervention. However, such wide-ranging bans may not be similarly embraced by those favouring a tolerant or democratic approach to their dealings with pupils. These differing preferences and practices are, to an extent, symptomatic of a philosophical divide between the smoke-free school movement and the democratically motivated HPS concept (I. Young, Health Education Board for Scotland, pers. commun.).
In the interviews with support staff, many accounts implied that pupils failed to accept them as exercising any kind of authority. This suggests that for smoking bans to be effectively enforced, an opportunity is lost if schools neglect the potential of these staff members. The challenge then is for schools to communicate to pupils that these staff are conferred with this authority, thus empowering them to play their part in the invoking of the appropriate school procedures.
As highlighted in the Introduction, the HPS concept assumes a high profile in the public health and education agendas. We believe that the findings emerging from this study expose some inherent tensions within this model.
The HPS is based on a commitment to the nurturing of a positive ethos, a cornerstone of which is good staff–pupil relationships. Yet it was precisely this commitment to good relationships [identified by staff here as a foundation for teaching and learning, and by staff and pupils alike in our pilot work (Gordon and Turner, 2000)] that constituted a barrier for some in intervening when faced with pupil smoking. This anomaly uncovers a tension within the HPS model—the potential for a conflict between a ‘learning and teaching agenda’, on the one hand, and a ‘health agenda’, on the other, both of which are held to be mediated by good staff–pupil relations.
Another factor inhibiting intervention was a reluctance among some to act as disciplinarians on smoking matters, a reticence partly reflecting personally held tolerant or democratic philosophies. Nutbeam has already identified this issue, reporting that many schools and individual teachers can have a ‘philosophical resistance’ to acting as agents for modifying behaviour (Nutbeam, 1995). While some recent conceptualizations of the HPS favour a democratic approach to pupil health, casting teachers as receptive to the child and rejecting the moralistic tone implied in traditional incarnations of the concept [e.g. (Jensen 1997, 2000)], the question remains as to how a school should behave when confronted with smoking among its pupils. To implement smoking bans that extend to the school gates and possibly beyond may be viewed as a draconian measure, out of kilter with the HPS movement’s commitment to pupil participation and empowerment. Yet, given that the HPS places health policies high on its agenda, there is clearly the potential for conflict between a philosophy which is premised on a notion of pupil agency/empowerment (a view supported by many staff here) and the implementation of a value-based policy (that holds that smoking is unacceptable).
The third tension concerns staff health and well-being, and the furthering of a health agenda. Staff health is identified as one of the criteria for the HPS, and yet it was precisely for reasons of their own physical and emotional safety that some expressed a reticence to intervene. It may be that our findings reflect low levels of staff authority within the schools studied and that such authority is a pre-requisite to such activity. However, although the HPS may feature disciplinary procedures as one of many possible areas for action (e.g. Scottish Executive Department of Health, 1999), it fails to assert such a foundation as necessary.
The fourth tension relates to the fact that the HPS is based on a holistic view of health. Crucial to this lies the notion of pupil welfare, and concomitant attention to the physical, social and the emotional needs of the pupils. Our interviews with staff suggested that they sometimes prioritized pupil welfare considerations over dealing with smoking behaviour. Given that the HPS concept holds both to be key and fails to prioritize one over the other, schools can be left with the dilemma as to how they should reconcile these, at times conflicting, agendas.
School smoking bans (implicitly or explicitly) place an onus on staff to respond when faced with pupil smoking, and the findings presented here reveal that staff can experience difficulties and professional conflicts in doing so. The tensions presented indicate the need for public health protagonists and policy makers to find ways of enforcing school smoking bans that are compatible with schools’ social and educational aims. This is not the end of the story, however. Schools are busy places. Staff are routinely faced with the task of juggling competing roles. Furthermore, in recognizing multifarious and potent external influences on pupil smoking, staff can feel dispirited in their efforts, recognizing that the relatively modest part that they play is unlikely to be the difference between a pupil smoking or not. This sentiment is supported by the literature: no single method is likely to be successful on its own (Stead et al., 1996; Tyas and Pederson, 1998; NHS Centre for Reviews and Dissemination, 1999; Moore et al., 2001). Unless school activity is reinforced and supported by concerted, strategic and sustained developments, it may be that unfair demands are placed on schools and their staff to tackle the continuing problem of teenage smoking.
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1 THiS study was granted ethical approval from the University of Glasgow Ethics Committee for Non-clinical Research using Human Subjects.
2 Flanders from The Simpsons is a reference to a character in a well-known cartoon. Flanders is a very committed Christian whose morality and extremely correct behaviour is used as a butt for some of the programme’s humour.
3 This particular guidance teacher is also a member of the SMT.
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We would like to thank the following people for their comments on earlier drafts of this paper: Katie Buston, Helen Sweeting and Patrick West, all from the MRC Social and Public Health Sciences Unit, and Ian Young from the Health Education Board for Scotland. Thanks too to our colleague Mary Robins for help in accessing references. The study reported here is funded by the UK Medical Research Council.
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Received on January 16, 2002; accepted on May 1, 2002
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