CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION
During 1990/91, I was working as TVEI [Technical and Vocational Educational Instruction?] Co-ordinator at Cassio College, a middle-sized Further Education College in Watford, Hertfordshire. It was the time, when fear of a major global AIDS epidemic was hitting the headlines and Herts LEA [Local Eucation Authority], through its Drug Prevention and Health Education Unit, made £7,000 funding available to the College for a study of teaching styles, to increase the effectiveness of health education programmes for the 16-18 age group. The study compared three modes of delivering health education:
Student-led tutorial
Teacher-led tutorial
Curriculum-led
and sought to ensure continuity of health education programmes from Year 11 of secondary school into the first year of post compulsory education, Year 12, at 16+. Feedback from students played a key role in evaluating the effectiveness of health education programmes at school and college. A summary of recommendations of the project is attached at Appendix 3.
As Project Co-ordinator, I became increasingly concerned, as it progressed, that while the chief criticism by pupils and students was that they were not given sufficient accurate information, the literature emanating from the Health Education Authority, via local Health Promotion Units, the chief source of information used by teachers, gave no reference to original scientific papers. It seemed that, whereas in any other scientific field, teachers were familiar with key developments (the first vaccinations by Jenner or the work of Pasteur in food preservation), they had no knowledge of the key players or events in the discovery of HIV as the cause of AIDS.
During the course of the project, the County Drug Prevention and Health Education Co-ordinator, Dr Stuart Ware, introduced me to Margaret Gascoigne, a retired teacher from Stevenage, who had made a specialism of secondary school health education programmes. During 1993 she published the results of a research study entitled "Sex and HIV/AIDS Education Provision in Hertfordshire Secondary Schools 1991/92". In this study she surveyed:
- the number of schools with health education policies and the nature of those policies
- the curriculum areas in which health education was covered
- the school years in which health education occurred and peaked
- the teaching methods used
- the staff involved
- the provision of staff development
- the involvement of parent and governors
- methods of evaluation of health education programmes.
A summary of her conclusions and recommendations is attached as Appendix 4.
My concerns over the quality of information delivered to students about HIV and AIDS, coupled with Gascoigne's findings, that there was significant variation in approaches to and quality of health education programmes in Hertfordshire schools, has led me to home in on HIV and AIDS education programmes in particular in this study.
I have set out to establish the scientific facts about HIV and AIDS and to explore the extent to which teachers (through specialist journals, through the mass media and through widely used text books and learning materials from the health Education Authority and other educational sources), are aware of these facts.
Since Gascoigne identified PSE and Science as the major curriculum areas in which health education is covered, I used a questionnaire to survey PSE and Science teachers in Hertfordshire secondary schools about their own perceptions of the HIV/AIDS education they delivered. Through the questionnaire, I sought to establish whether teachers perceived their role mainly as imparting knowledge or as allowing students to explore attitudes and values and also to establish the sources of information used by teachers and teaching styles. I then sought to compare the teachers' responses with feedback from first year college students, about the HIV/AIDS education they had received at the schools they had recently left. The student questionnaire investigated the sources of information used by young people and the accuracy and depth of their understanding about HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases.
Finally, I have sought to use the results of the study to recommend improvements in HIV/AIDS education programmes in the future.
In summary, the aims of the study are to:
- clarify the current state of knowledge about HIV and AIDS as published in the specialist scientific literature (Chapter 2).
- identify the extent to which this knowledge is reported in the mass media (newspapers and TV) (Chapter 3).
- establish whether commonly used Health Education literature and learning resource materials reflect this knowledge (Chapter 4).
- describe and evaluate the research methods used (Chapter 5).
- establish the extent to which teachers deliver HIV/AIDS education or training, and how they themselves perceive their role (Chapter 6).
- define the knowledge base of recent school-leavers about HIV and AIDS (Chapter 7).
- compare the results of the teacher and student surveys to draw conclusions about the current state of HIV/AIDS education programmes and to recommend possible improvements (Chapter 8).
Because of an unavoidable delay of more than one year between undertaking the research and writing it up, the originality of the literature review reported in Chapter 2 has been reduced and the situation in Hertfordshire schools may have changed since the surveys were administered.
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CONTENTS & ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS & ABSTRACT
CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER 2: THE SCIENCE OF HIV AND AIDS
CHAPTER 3: MEDIA COVERAGE OF HIV AND AIDS
TABLE 1 - HIV/AIDS NEWSPAPER COVERAGE
CHAPTER 4: HEALTH EDUCATION PROGRAMMES...
TABLE 2 - WIDELY USED ... MATERIAL
CHAPTER 5: RESEARCH STRATEGY AND METHODOLOGY
CHAPTER 6: ... HIV/AIDS EDUCATION IN 60 ... SCHOOLS
CHAPTER 7: ... STUDENTS' EXPERIENCES OF SCHOOL HIV/AIDS EDUCATION
CHAPTER 8: CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
APPENDICES
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