A behind-the-scenes look at the development of School-Based Substance Use Prevention, Education, and Intervention: A Multi-Tiered and Developmental Approach for Kindergarten to Grade 12 Schools in Canada
A pan-Canadian standard for how schools approach substance use must be built with the people who will live with it.
Over three years, from 2023 to 2026, School-Based Substance Use Prevention, Education, and Intervention: A Multi-Tiered and Developmental Approach for Kindergarten to Grade 12 Schools in Canada (the “Standard”) was co-developed through a collaboration spanning K–12 education, public health, substance use research, youth networks, and Indigenous knowledge holders. The process was designed to produce guidance that is both rigorous and usable in real schools.
The Standard is the first product of Anchoring Change, a national initiative to transform how schools across Canada approach substance use prevention, education, and intervention through coordinated, evidence-informed guidance and the resources needed to put it into practice.
Anchoring Change is led through a collaborative partnership among Wellstream: The Canadian Centre for Innovation in Child and Youth Mental Health and Substance Use at the University of British Columbia (UBC), the Canadian Centre on Substance Use and Addiction (CCSA), the Canadian Association of School System Administrators (CASSA), Physical and Health Education (PHE) Canada, and the Students Commission of Canada, with standard development managed by CSA Group, a standards development organization accredited by the Standards Council of Canada.
The story below is how those partners, and many more contributors, built the Standard together.
How the Standard Was Built
A three-year, two-phase co-development process | 2023 – 2026
Phase 1: Building the evidence base (2023-2025)
Before drafting a single clause, the Wellstream team at the UBC set out to characterize the landscape. Four interconnected research activities shaped what the Standard would need to do:
- A systematic review and meta-analysis of school-based substance use prevention programming concluded that comprehensive, whole-school approaches that build social-emotional competencies and incorporate harm minimization are needed. Standalone programs and abstinence-or information-only approaches are not effective and can cause harm.
- A national survey of principals and vice-principals revealed both deep inequities in current programming and a strong demand from the education sector for evidence-informed guidance and practical resources.
- A critical content analysis of Canadian news media coverage of youth substance use (2016–2024) illuminated how public discourse frames the issue and where school-based responses are missing from the conversation.
- A review of existing national and international guidance, including the CCSA’s 2010 Canadian Standards for School-Based Youth Substance Abuse Prevention, the UNODC/WHO International Standards on Drug Use Prevention, and the Public Health Agency of Canada’s Blueprint for Action, identified what to build on.
Phase 2: Developing the Standard (2025-2026)
Phase 2 moved the initiative into formal standard development, managed by CSA Group using its established, accredited process. Throughout this phase, the Anchoring Change executive committee — drawn from the five national partners — guided the work, setting direction and stewarding the partnership’s shared commitments. The day-to-day drafting was carried out by a multidisciplinary expert committee, with broader input gathered through engagement and public review.
The multidisciplinary committee of 30 subject-matter experts, including educators, health and policy professionals, researchers, youth representatives, Francophone participants, First Nations, Inuit, and Métis members, and an Elder, met eight times between May 2025 and March 2026. Between meetings, the committee reviewed and refined draft clauses built from six evidence domains distilled during Phase 1:
- Upstream prevention and belonging-based practices
- Strengths-based policies and practices
- Screening and relationship-based monitoring
- Student and family/caregiver engagement
- Evidence-informed education and messaging
- School–community partnerships
The Standard’s recommendations incorporate shall/should/may language that reflects the strength of the underlying evidence: shall signals practices with the greatest potential for impact based on strong evidence, should signals practices that are well-supported and recommended, and may signals promising practices best calibrated to local context and capacity.
A subgroup of the committee also reviewed the French translation of the Standard to ensure the document would be clear, credible, and usable in French-language-first schools across the country, and another subgroup of the committee explored what would be required to bring a decolonizing lens to the standard development process and support its use in Indigenous settings.
Commitment to Consensus
Every clause in the Standard was reached through consensus-based decision-making, consistent with CSA Group’s rigorous methodology. Consensus was achieved on all content in the final Standard.
Input extended beyond the committee itself. An enhanced engagement session brought in additional voices from health, education, policy, and youth networks, and a two-month public review (November 2025 – January 2026), hosted on CSA Group’s website, invited feedback on the draft English and French Standard from any interested party. All submissions were reviewed by both the Anchoring Change executive committee and multidisciplinary expert committees and incorporated where appropriate.
What comes next
After three years and the collective wisdom of more than 30 experts, hundreds of public reviewers, and partners across every region of the country, the Standard is here. It’s a shared resource — and a starting point. For the Anchoring Change initiative partners, the more exciting work lies ahead: supporting schools, districts, and communities to put the Standard into practice, backed by the implementation tools and resources now available, with more to come. We’re looking forward to learning alongside everyone who takes it up.
