Harrow

[2twinsplusone]

Is there anyone with a DS at Harrow who can reassure me about the drug culture at Harrow School? Today's news has seriously made me doubt my confidence in the school. Am I being naive?

I completely understand, and sympathise. Anyone would be worried.
Do you know other parents you can speak to?

FWIW, the school is probably furiously working on how to do 'damage control' to reassure parents - but understand that that really doesn't address what has happened..

This?

www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/01/28/harrow-pupils-collapse-taking-ecstasy/

All schools get problems with drugs from time to time, and it doesn't automatically mean there is a 'drugs culture'. What does matter is how the school deals with it.

If you are a parent, contact your DS's house master. If a prospective parent, ring the admissions office and ask to talk to an SMT member with pastoral responsibility.

I suspect I'm being a bit sheltered and it goes on in a lot of schools. My eldest is 15 so I'm new to children testing limits and experimenting.

They are teenagers and probably, unlike the vast majority of teenagers, have the cash to buy drugs too. You are being naive to think that some of them won't and, in all probability, that more of them will because they have the means to do so than in schools where pupils don't have access to the money.

As a (comprehensive school) teacher we don't have a drug problem, but we have had pupils kicked out a few times in the 10 years I've worked there.

Teenagers take stupid risks. It is in their nature to do so- independent of their family income, social background or schooling. It is related to the way the brain develops.
Anyone who believes that the teen drugs market lives off the 10% of students in private schools is deluded. Some of these students have more disposable income than their state school counterparts, but that will not be the case across the board. There are many wealthy students in the state system.
Drug use exists among all sectors of society and the majority of teen drug users will be in the state system because that is where the majority of students are educated. Incidents like this take place all the time. They are only newsworthy when journalists can tag them with "Harrow" "Eton" "public school" "convent school" "peer's daughter" or similar.

Chapultepec564
Very good point, noted.

This could have happened anywhere. It is naive to think otherwise. Truro had a similar incident recently on a school trip. It is how the school reacts to and deals with incidents like this which is important. Whatever measures are in place, if kids want to try drugs they will. Sad, but true.