Social education is good for health

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Abstract
Results from a survey of smoking prevalence among 10,529 pupils from ten co‐educational comprehensive schools in the County of Avon suggest a clear relationship between smoking prevalence and the place of smoking education in the school curriculum. Based on pupils’ recall of lessons, the schools were split into those in which smoking was dealt with more predominantly within (broadly) biology/science lessons as distinct from the social education part of the curriculum. Within the six schools where this ‘science bias’ in smoking education was relatively high, the overall percentage of self‐reported daily smokers was 15.0 per cent compared with 10.1 per cent in the remaining schools with a lower science bias. This finding appears not to be influenced by the social class catchment of the schools, as judged from pupils’ reports of their fathers’ occupations, even though individual pupils’ smoking was related to their own fathers’ occupational status.