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2.3 Characteristics of peer education

Certain elements were found to be common to all successful peer education schemes.

The manager of a Scotland-wide peer education project set out the following pre-requisites of any successful peer education scheme:

• Conduct a needs analysis or needs assessment, to make sure that the need is real and not assumed.
• Establish aims and objectives of the programme.
• Develop appropriate selection and recruitment procedures for participants.
• Establish a framework for involvement of all participants.
• Devise an appropriate training programme.
• Assess support needs and cost implications.
• Establish where the main lead will come from and provide appropriate support.
• Monitor and evaluate the project.
• Develop a framework for deployment of peer educators and their roles.

This interviewee also observed that it was important for the momentum for peer education to have come from the pupils working as educators.

As reported above, the Advisers who were interviewed provided an overview of the main issues connected with peer education. They identified a number of pre-requisites of successful peer education, which would make demands on staff and pupil time. Training and adequate supervision or monitoring were the main issues identified by Advisers.

Teachers agreed that issues of recruitment, training and timetabling were important to schools taking part in peer education.

This section will now explore the following issues identified as key to successful peer education:

• Recruitment of peer educators
• Training of peer educators
• Support for peer educators
• Management of scheme

2.3.1 Recruitment of peer educators

The schemes encountered in the schools visited varied in their recruitment practices. In one school, potential peer educators were asked to volunteer to take part and were then subject to a selection procedure. In the remaining three schools, all pupils who volunteered to take part were accepted as peer educators.

The school in which peer educators were selected was the only school to offer a specific programme (drugs and alcohol education) to be covered by the educators. In the other three schools, programmes were offered on an ad hoc basis, the content depending on the needs of the target pupils and the strengths of the educators.

There was found to be no difference in educator dropout rates between the two types of scheme. In three of the four schemes, there were more female than male pupils involved as peer educators.

2.3.2 Training of peer educators

The NHS Development Agency noted:

Successful peer educators need effective training. ⁶

Fast Forward, another agency involved in promoting health (through education by, with and for young people) has and made use of peer education. Its ethos runs:

When defining Peer Education a number of elements and values need to be considered so that peers fully inform the process and do not just spout a set adult agenda.

Peer education is an approach which empowers young people to work with other young people, and which draws on the positive strength of the peer group. By means of appropriate training and support, the young people become active players in the educational process rather than passive recipients of a set message. Central to this work is the collaboration between young people and adults.⁷

Some peer education projects have involved the development of resources, and involvement in this process, while time consuming for all participants, would allow more ownership of the materials produced for use by peer educators.

Make sure that when you are planning to involve young people, their participation is not "token" or manipulated by adults. With growing requirements for user involvement in research, there is a danger that young people's participation could be undertaken simply as a tick box exercise. Meaningful involvement requires thought and consideration for those who will be involved to ensure they are able to usefully contribute to, and benefit from, the research process. If participation is done badly, this may have negative consequences, including cynicism from young people about the value of taking part in future initiatives. ⁸

Three of the four schools taking part in this research involved outside agencies in the peer educator training programme, and all three of these schools held peer educator training outwith the school premises. This formalisation of the training process was felt to give it more weight: by distancing it from the school buildings and having it delivered by outsiders to the school, teachers believed that it had more impact on the peer educators, and made the process more effective. In the fourth school, training and time management issues involved guidance staff. A previous member of staff had been seconded for a period to look at various relevant training issues. A Depute Head Teacher conducted buddy training in this school.

In two of the three schools where pupils had peer education training delivered outwith school premises, outsiders to the school were involved. For one school, these outsiders were members of the Community Education Department and for another, they were part of the local authority's Educational Psychology department. In the school whose training input involved educational psychologists, members of the Guidance department also made some contribution. Pupils in both of these schools were given advice about handling sensitive issues and dealing with disturbing disclosures that the younger target group of pupils might make.

In the school where peer education involved alcohol and drug education, pupils were given specialist information about these topics, suitable for the age group that they would be working with, as well as advice on how to work with younger pupils. The training covered not just factual information to be passed on, but ways of interacting with other pupils. The object of this was to ensure that the peer educators could be seen as friends, and therefore a source of information that could be trusted. The peer educators in this school also had weekly meetings with the agency that ran the peer education programme, thus gaining back-up and an additional source of support as required.

Training sources varied in the four schools from exclusively internal, through to exclusively external, with one school combining internal with external. Even in the schools where it was conducted externally, training requirements for peer education would make some demands on the time of staff, in terms of the timetabling issues that would have to be taken into account to provide time for training.

Whether school staff, outsiders to the school, or a combination of both is used, training procedures require to be acceptable to the schools involved, and timetabling of training to fit in with both the pupils' and their trainers' (whether or not these are teachers) other commitments. It is important that peer educators be given both the factual subject matter that they need to be useful and credible sources of information to their target group, and also that they should have the social skills to develop relationships with those pupils whom they are educating.

In addition to sensitive issues that may be covered, it is important to consider support required to build up a body of information about a topic. It is unlikely that schools would have sufficient information about RSE to enable them to run their own training programmes, and so sources of information on this would have to be identified to enable comprehensive training to be provided to participants and appropriate training resources developed. It was felt by some commentators (particularly teachers and pupils interviewed) that information passed on to peer educators by a source outside the school had more authenticity and currency than information passed on by teachers. It is likely that RSOs would be an appropriate source of information on RSE.

2.3.3 Support for peer educators

Support was essential for all participants in the peer education process. Within the schools taking part in the research, different support mechanisms were in place for the pupils working as peer educators. Teachers and members of external agencies involved in supporting buddying schemes were aware that the peer educators or "buddies" might, albeit rarely, come across some sensitive information about another pupil in the course of their work with them. In two schools, there were structures in place (contact with an educational psychologist in one case, with Community Education staff in another) to enable the peer educators to discuss issues of this sort. It is unlikely that this type of situation would arise where neutral topics, such as RSE, were being covered. However, it is important to recognise that peer educators may be placed in a position of trust by their target group of pupils, and be exposed to situations where they may require support from adults.

As described in the section above, some peer education projects are administered from within schools: others have input from external bodies. No standard programme exits for peer educators, but it would be important to consider support needs that could be addressed in developing a standard programme, such as might happen for RSE. Rather than working in isolation, or reinventing procedures that had been developed by other practitioners, a network would provide the means of sharing and supporting good practice between peer educators.

Writing from the Department of Child Health, University of Exeter, John Rees carried out a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) analysis of Peer Education networks, capable of being used for sharing good practice. A summary of his analysis of the strengths of such a network is:

A network's strengths lie in the opportunities to share, learn from and develop good practice, which could be hugely supportive to newcomers to the work and to help the more experienced to refine and improve their practice. ⁹

The Scottish Schools Ethos Network, a Scottish Executive funded project, has promoted the importance of developing a positive school ethos. A positive ethos has been identified in many school improvement studies as being fundamental to raising achievement and was linked to the development of anti-bullying, peer support and other whole school strategies. The Network has developed themes such as positive discipline, pupil participation and inclusion through events and publications. Teachers and other professionals with an interest in Scottish education have been invited to register with the Network, which has acted as a forum for the exchange of experiences. It has hosted the Ethosnet ¹⁰ website. The Ethosnet website has provided links to case studies and reports examples of peer education within schools. In many of these, peer education was one aspect of the educational process being described.

Following recognition that there were a number of peer education projects in Scotland, many of which were isolated, lacking necessary support and resources to reach their full potential, Fast Forward launched the Scottish Peer Education Network ( SPEN). SPEN helps communication between, and offers support to, anyone involved and interested in peer education ¹¹. It was funded by the Scottish Executive to address the issues of support and promotion of good practice in peer education. Its main aims are to:

• Support new and existing initiatives.
• Improve communication and the sharing of experiences.
• Devise and deliver training.
• Develop capacity building and sustainability opportunities.
• Support young people and local workers to influence the development of best practice in the way peer education is delivered.

The peer education network site provides links to a number of peer education websites and acts to facilitate contact between peer educators. SPEN now runs conferences and workshops to help peer educators.

Europeer ¹² is a Europe wide peer education network. Set up to support health education peer educators, mainly in sexual health, its website reinforces the links that exist between, and offers support to, practitioners working on the same topic in different countries.

2.3.4 Management of peer education

Management of peer education schemes was found to be critical to their success, and would affect the sustainability of any peer education programme.

Teaching staff identified management issues as core to the success of peer education, arguing that any problems would centre round sustainability and organisational problems. The following key issues were identified:

• Administrative issues would involve additional timetabling, as it would be necessary to make sure peer educators were available and that peer education demands did not interfere with their studies.
• Some supervision by teaching staff would be required to support peer education schemes. In one school, supervision of peer education fell to the head of the relevant department, putting more time pressure on individual teachers.
• A lack of continuity that might be caused by senior pupils on exam leave,
• There might be inconsistencies between the ways in which different pupils in the school carried out peer education.
• Where peer education was run on a voluntary basis, there was the possibility that educators might withdraw from the programme and the school have no means of enforcing their participation.

Whether a peer education scheme was run from within the school or by an agency from outwith the school, the following issues would have to be addressed by the team or individual responsible for managing the project(s)

• Pupil recruitment (by selection or an open process)
• Training (of all participants)
• Timetabling for pupils who became involved as peer educators
• Resource development, as the resources used by the peer educators had to be suitable for this kind of use and to be materials which the peer educators felt comfortable using.
• Evaluation: an evaluation of the peer education scheme should be carried out regularly, involving the pupil targets of such a scheme, teachers and peer educators themselves.
• Potential for development: the peer education programme should be flexible and capable of development to accommodate new issues and new treatments of existing topics.

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