PUBLIC SCHOOLS, PRIVATE VICES
Vicki Woods on
random drug-testing for schoolchildren
DRUG-taking at public school is a hot topic around Sunday lunch-tables on weekend exeats this term. 'Seven boys at my school have been expelled for taking drugs,' said a chirpy 14-year-old to whom I recently passed the broccoli. (He added, during the growing silence, 'But I only knew one of them. Er, not very well.') Dr Hugh McCollum, a Staffordshire GP and independent drug-tester to the Lawn Tennis Association and the Test and Coun- try Cricket Board, wrote a thundering piece in the Daily Mail about how to overcome 'this evil menace'. He proposed that public schools should institute sys- tematic random drug tests for all pupils.
Dr McCollum's company, Drugs in Education, is prepared to swing into action at £12 a head (or £25 for a package to include drug-abuse education). 'My plan is to start with public schools — where most of the pupils are boarders . . . . We can institute tests by simple urine assessments — along the same lines as those carried out in sport.' Dr McCollum is not so naïve, he wrote, as to imagine that 'we can introduce the scheme overnight. It is going to be difficult, there will be tough opposi- tion . . .' (he mentioned 'siren shrieks from civil libertarians') but he concluded, 'It will be worth it for our children's sake.'
Drug abuse is undeniably on the increase but the vast majority of people know little more about the subject than they read in the papers. In my experience, adults who have no personal involvement with drug abuse (and this includes most public-school parents and most public-school teachers) divide into two camps on how to deal with it. You might call one camp 'naïve' and the other 'cynical'. The naïve are shocked, appalled and bemused by the whole idea of drugs. They might drink like fishes, smoke like chimneys and swallow patent medi- cines themselves but 'street drugs' (dread words!) horrify them. They see such drugs as a plague, a contaminant, from which children must be protected by any means.
The cynical are not so shock-horrified. They wonder whether soft drugs shouldn't perhaps be legalised and cite Prohibition and Al Capone. They point out that alcohol does more damage, by numbers, than drugs do. They say that it's easier to stop being a heroin addict (takes three weeks) than to stop being an alcoholic (takes the rest of your life).
The naïve camp includes most of the parents at my Sunday lunch, the Daily Mail, President Bush and, despite his protests, Dr Hugh McCollum. The cynical camp includes leader-writers on the Times, signatories to those occasional letters ab- out legalising cannabis, and, funnily enough, most heads of public schools.
Dr McCollum's motives in launching his campaign are partly commercial (though he says that his new company would be non-profit-making), partly parental. He became concerned when cannabis was discovered at Millfield, which his two sons attend. He told me, 'There's a word for people who use cannabis quite a lot, you know.' I thought he meant a medical term, but he went on, 'They're called "pot- heads", and there's no get-up-and-go ab- out them.'
He wrote to 20 schools (he has since contacted more) suggesting that they take up his company's services. 'I chose schools where I thought there might be a problem; where there had been arrests or expul- sions.' He won't say which, but one was Millfield, and another was Marlborough College. The schools received a leaflet about how testing would work and potted biographies of the Drugs in Education team, its female members chattily named as Sian, Ali and Cherry Ca caring mother'). Also, a sample questionnaire to copy to parents with questions such as, should schools take practical steps to en- sure that children are protected? Would you favour random testing? Yes/no/don't know. The literature appears to have been written hastily and in the demotic, and it is spotted with mistakes in spelling and gram- mar which can't have endeared Dr McCol- lum to his target audience of Head Men.
Despite Dr McCollum's hopes, few pub- lic schools will send out such a question- naire (and not just because it's badly written). His proposals have been greeted by most education professionals with guarded horror (guarded because public schools writhe away like cut worms from press publicity about any aspect of drugs). Dr David Jewell, Master of Haileybury and chairman of the Head Masters' Con- ference this year, is vehement in his opposition. He rejects any parallel with drug-testing in sport. 'Athletes take drugs to increase their performance, to cheat. Children don't take drugs to get a better A-level.' Random drug-testing would be a 'deplorable practice', for moral and prac- tical reasons. 'It's illegal, for one thing, unless you get parental permission for boys under 16. Boys over 16 have to sign on their own behalf; and you can't simply take a refusal to sign as a positive result.' He draws a parallel with the abolition of corporal punishment in the state sector, when some schools (not his) could still beat the paying customers but had to forbear on the Assisted Places. The moral reason hangs on trust: the teacher must stand in a relationship of trust with the person being taught. I put this objection to Dr McCol- lum, and he countered: 'Well, that's where an outside agency comes in. It's not the masters who'd be doing the testing; it's an outside body.' He added, 'Some schools who are thinking about this are discussing doing the teachers as well.' That should ease parental concern.
Dr McCollum's proposal hasn't been discussed at HMC (which represents 230 public schools), and Dr Jewell doesn't intend to put it on the agenda. The Girls Schools Association hasn't debated it either; nor did the Boarding Schools Asso- ciation (which includes state boarding schools) at their annual conference a fort- night ago, which discussed the 'physical, mental and spiritual health of pupils'.
Millfield which is expensively educating Dr McCollum's two sons, said, 'We are giving it careful thought. Dr McCollum is a parent here, as you know.' Ampleforth sent out a letter saying that random drug- testing would be 'a radical shift in educa- tion method' and 'wholly unacceptable'. I mentioned Dr McCollum's idea about routinely testing the masters, too, to head- master Father Dominic Kilroy, who prac- ticaly yelped. 'I find that appalling! We're talking about essential personal liberties. A lot of disagreeable things have been made routine by totalitarian states, but that doesn't make them acceptable here.'
Most heads are awaiting Marlborough College's next move. Marlborough, which Dr McCollum says is 'poised' to introduce the scheme, has asked all parents for their views. So far, claims McCollum, '85 per cent' of Marlborough parents agreed with him. But the Registrar, Mr Jeremy Wode- house, told me that only two-thirds of the letters have been sent back, that Marl- borough was presently evaluating the re- sponses, that there was much consultation to do both internally and externally, and that 'we would wish not to be fettered by a deadline'. Mr Woodhouse is effulgently polite and spent a patient hour not answer- ing the question, 'Will these tests be introduced and, if so, when?' Marlborough is going through a sensitive patch on drugs at the moment, presumably still reeling from snappy tabloid headlines on the subject (`Random pot shots at cannabis college' Daily Express, 23 April).
If Marlborough does introduce the tests, I think it will stand alone. I can hear the siren shrieks of civil libertarians, whom Dr McCollum despises, ringing round the quadrangles of our public schools.
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