‘No cigs’ plea to Accrington school parents (From Blackburn Citizen)

‘No cigs’ plea to Accrington school parents

6:04pm Friday 5th June 2009

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AN initiative to stop parents from smoking outside schools is be-ing spearheaded by an Accrington school.

Pupils at Mount Pleasant County Primary School have produced a banner to be placed at the school gates, to raise awareness that children are three times more likely to take up smoking if their parents are smokers.

The school worked with NHS East Lancashire as part of a campaign to reduce the number of parents smoking in and around schools.

Pupils were asked to create a poster raising awareness of the issue with the winning banner being designed by Megan Smith, featuring the slogan ‘You smoke, we Copy.’ Peter Pendlebury, health development specialist in tobacco control, said: “Many parents may be unaware that if they smoke, their children are three times more likely to take up the habit.

“Therefore it’s important to discourage smoking in the places where children should be protected – at school and in the home.

“We already run a successful Smokefree Ho-mes scheme, where par-ents pledge to keep their home smoke free to protect their children.

“So we wanted to work with schools, where often parents will be smoking at the school gates when waiting to collect their children.”

Mount Pleasant High School is one of six schools that NHS East Lanca-shire’s Stop Smoking Service is working with to raise awareness of the dangers of smoking.

Anne O’Neill, specialist advisor at the Stop Smok-ing Service, worked with the children to produce the banner. Reducing the rate of smoking is part of NHS East Lancashire’s ‘Save a million years of life by 2011’ (SMYL) campaign.

The campaign aims to reduce health inequalities in Burnley, Hyndburn, Pendle, Ribble Valley and Rossendale, by focussing on six core health issues which are prevalent in East Lancashire – alcohol misuse, chronic heart dis-ease, drug abuse, smoking, infant mortality and geographic inequalities.

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