Characteristics and perspectives of the teacher in the prevention of addictions in the school environment in the city of Valencia

Spanish legislation currently indicates that teachers are the main professional group applying\r\npreventive activities in the drug addiction field at school. These activities are optional and schools\r\ncan choose whether to apply them or not. The scientific community does not agree whether\r\nteachers are the best professionals to take on this task, or whether there are other more expert\r\nprofessionals to do this, such as prevention specialists. This ambiguous situation indicates that\r\nteachers’ roles in prevention of drug addiction should be reviewed. The aim of this study is to\r\nanalyze the characteristics and perspectives of teachers in the prevention of drug addiction\r\namong school students. To this end, a descriptive analysis about the preventive role of teachers\r\nin primary, high school and professional training at public and private schools in Valencia city has\r\nbeen carried out. Data has been collected by an electronic survey distributed among schools,\r\nconsisting of 32 items divided into 7 topic areas (n=202 responses). An analysis of the results\r\nshows that age, experience and the type of school have no influence on conducting preventive\r\nactivities or not, but teacher training in prevention of addictions seems to be a determining\r\nfactor. Moreover, high school students are the ones to benefit most from preventive activities.\r\nAmong the proposals for improvement made by teachers, a higher presence of prevention\r\nspecialists is highlighted. Finally, evaluation is still a pending task, because teachers do not even\r\nknow if their prevention activities are evaluated.