February 13, 2018
School pupils take smoking lesson
It's no longer cool to smoke in school.
Action on Smoking and Health's found in 2016 only 2.2 percent of year ten students smoke daily.
That's the lowest smoking rates recorded since 1999 when 15.2 percent of students smoked daily.
At the same time, the number of students who have never even taken a puff of a cigarette has increased to nearly 80 percent, an increase from only 55 percent a decade ago.
Programme Manager, Boyd Broughton says the decline in smoking for year ten students is one of the big success stories of the smokefree movement in New Zealand.
While the overall smoking rates were at record lows for all young people, Maori students were more than 5 times more likely to report smoking than European students with 5.9 percent smoking daily compared to 1 percent of European students.
Mr Broughton says the research sows young people get the message, and it is time for parents to support their ambitions to live smokefree.
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