REDEsign

Resilience building, Empowering, Drug Education in British Sign Language.

Between November 2025 and July 2026 we received National Lottery funding to work with the staff and students at Elmfield School for Deaf Children, Savannah Ritchie (our young Deaf Filmmaker), and Carolyn Denmark (Deaf Translator) to coproduce Deaf-centric drug education films in British Sign Language. This is the first time drug education films for young people have been made in this way, and we hope this will make harm reduction drug information accessible to Deaf young people across the UK. .

The films are designed to be used in Deaf specialist schools with KS 3 and 4 students as part of PSHE,. When you watch the films we have inserted thought bubbles , timers and questions to allow for understanding and processing. You can pause the film at these points.. Each film is between 15 to 30 minutes long and each should provide you with enough content for one to two PSHE lessons. We have provided guidance for each film about how to deliver, and some suggestions for segmenting the films across different lessons.

Film 1: Drugs, the law and criminal exploitation.

The script for this film was co-developed through a series of workshops with Year 9 Students . Our initial workshops built understanding of the law, drug markets, criminal exploitation., and safety. We then invited Tom Tooth , a Neighbourhood Police Officer for Avon and Somerset Constabulary, to visit the school to answer some questions, including how the police work to keep people safe from drug crime and criminal exploitation. Tom and the students ended up role playing a situation where an exploited teenager was caught dealing cannabis. The students had loads of fun trying to answer Tom’s questions , and this became an activity in our final film Tom then helped edit our co-produced script which includes a story about a teenager, Ali, who gets groomed by Jay and exploited to sell drugs. .

The film shows Tom answering the student’s questions about drugs and the law, then tells the story of Ali and Jay The story ends with Ali and Jay being bought in for police questioning. See if your students can answer Tom’s questions and find out what happens to Ali and Jay.

If you are delivering this film across two lessons, you could watch the questions for the first lesson, then look at the story of Ali and Jay for the second lesson.

Use the thought bubbles and timer screens to pause the film and check student’s understanding.

Film 2: Alcohol

We coproduced this film with year 9s. The process of co-producing the script involved lot of role play! We delivered alcohol lessons, then the year 9s role played delivering an alcohol lesson. The students acted out how they have seen alcohol on television, then the students developed a role play about a family party where alcohol is used. Finally the BE project acted out how a drugs worker, youth worker or counsellor would be able to help a child affected by a family member’s alcohol use. Our final session was a full run through of our play in front of the staff at the school. The role play became the script for our film and the student’s acting is captured as animation.

This film tells the story of Buzz, he is struggling with understanding alcohol in the world around him. The story follows Buzz in three situations where alcohol is spoken about, or becomes an issue; the classroom , his living room , a family party, and in a support session with the school counsellor, Miss Pink.

During the classroom scenes you can pause the video to answer Mrs. Turner’s questions about alcohol., you can also pause the video in the party scene to guess what might happen at the party after Olivia decides to try alcohol.

Film 3: Drug information

Young people who attend specialist Deaf schools usually cannot access information about drugs designed for hearing teenagers, this is because written English often excludes them. During the co-production of this film we went through information about five different drugs from the ‘Talk to Frank’ website and delivered this in BSL in small segments with pictures . We end up talking about two drugs on the film; Cannabis and Nitrous Oxide, and we follow the same delivery format we used in school.

During the classroom scenes you can pause the video and see if your students can answer the questions about the facts they have learnt.

You could just use the first section to deliver a lesson about cannabis, as this is the most popular illegal drug.

*Please note the fact about extent of cannabis use in young people is taken from the 2022 young people’s smoking drinking drug use survey.