http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/education/article2584678.ece

Middle-class pupils at independent schools are more vulnerable to drug abuse than other children because dealers are grooming young people whom they know to have generous personal allowances from their parents, a conference of elite schools was told yesterday.

Elizabeth Burton-Phillips, whose son Nick Mills killed himself in despair at his heroin addiction four years ago, cautioned members of the Headmasters’ and Headmistresses’ Conference (HMC) of 250 schools not to be in denial about the dangers of drug use.

“Could it be that one of the significant problems that middle-class youth face in our independent schools is denial that your school could ever have any drug problem, or the foolish belief that cannabis is not that serious?” she said at the conference in Bournemouth. Parents should not think that their children were shielded from the dangers just because they were in the “safe” environment of a fee-paying school, she added.

Her comments coincided with a warning to independent heads that the stress of examinations risked driving pupils to taking drugs, which can trigger serious mental illness.

Mrs Burton-Phillips, who is head of religious education at Godstowe, a preparatory school in Buckinghamshire, has taught in the independent sector for 35 years. Her twin sons, Nick and Simon Mills, attended Prior Park College in Bath and started smoking cannabis at the age of 13 before progressing to Ecstasy, LSD, cocaine, crack and heroin. They did well in their GCSEs at Prior Park College and both started A levels, but were suspended for taking drugs in the first term of the sixth form and dropped out of school soon after. A drug dealer targeted their social group and they were both on heroin within three years of leaving school.

Mrs Burton-Phillips said that a middle-class parent of a child in a fee-paying school had told her: “Of course we are lucky, we don’t have a problem with drugs in our schools in the Royal Borough of Windsor and Eton, because the Queen lives here. This is why we pay our fees.”

Mrs Burton-Phillips, who now tours independent and state-sector schools giving warning of the dangers of drug use, said that such parental complacency risked making pupils at independent schools feel “superior” and giving them a false security in their own ability to be in control of their drug taking. In reality, she said, pupils at fee-paying schools were likely to be in more danger than other children because they had more money.

“It has been my observation that large percentages of pupils in the senior schools feel that drugs cannot touch them. Sometimes they are sadly not grounded in family life, and are ‘compensated’ by having too much money,” she said. “The drug dealers are very aware of this. As one recovering public school cocaine addict recently said to me, ‘the drug dealers simply charge us twice the street price’.”

Anthony Seldon, head of Wellington College, who is patron of the charity that Mrs Burton-Phillips has set up to campaign against drug use, said that the “ideology of testing and examination as the sole criterion of what makes a good school” was driving some youngsters to take drugs. Schools needed to focus on improving the emotional resilience of students, he said, to help them to resist these pressures.

The comments by Mrs Burton- Phillips followed the case of William Jaggs, a former pupil of Harrow School and Oxford university, who was sent to a secure hospital this year for stabbing to death Lucy Brahams, a fashion designer. After the trial, the father of Miss Brahams blamed both institutions for turning a blind eye to the boy’s descent from the “gutter to the sewer”.

The Rev Tim Hastie-Smith, head of Dean Close School in Cheltenham, said that no HMC school was in denial about drugs but agreed that pupils at independent schools were targeted by dealers because they had money. He added that efforts by independent schools to counter the problem were hampered because no head wanted to admit in public that a pupil had been caught with drugs.