Vaping and Young People with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities: Desktop Review

Healthwatch Brighton and Hove undertook a desktop review of insight about vaping and young people with special educational needs and disabilities.  This was to inform a research project on this topic.

Key findings

This review could find no evidence that children and young people viewed smoking cigarettes as safer than vaping due to cigarettes originating from a more ‘natural’ product.

This review found limited research on SEND and vaping – most research done on SEND and vaping has tended to be conducted within a subsample of other surveys on vaping (e.g. Healthwatch Blackpool engaged SEND schools to participate alongside mainstream educational settings and found generally low prevalence of vaping among these students).

There is a significant association between vaping and ADHD and some limited evidence around the association between mental health and vaping. However, more evidence is needed to better understand how ongoing mental illness affects the uptake, use and cessation of vaping in children and young people

This desktop review has highlighted the need to conduct further research into the experiences of children and young people with SEND around vaping as such little research has been done on the topic. 

Past research has confirmed an association between mental health and vaping, and it would be particularly interesting to learn more about this at a local level. 

There is also a case to involve parents and carers of young people with SEND as again little has been done to examine the views of parents and carers around young people and vaping