A STEP-BY-STEP ''cookbook'' to a new scheme helping parents, teachers and students to tackle drug abuse, gangs and suicide is being issued by the Education Department.
The department has also issued 2,800 Understanding Student Suicide kits to 1,400 primary and secondary schools, and is lining up doctors and psychologists to talk to students.
The Assistant Director of Education (Services Division), Mrs Grace Yung Leung Yan-mei, said guidelines for the new Whole School Approach to Guidance would be issued to public schools within the next three months.
Guidance had tended to concentrate on individual students but the new approach would tackle group problems. Parents, students, and staff would design and implement programmes to address problems specific to their school.
Mrs Yung said the approach would ''cultivate the self-esteem of students who help and those who are helped, making them less likely to turn to other substances or undesirable characters because they feel insecure, unsuccessful or lonely''.
She said the guidelines would provide a ''step-by-step cookbook'' including case studies.
About $1 million had been allocated to the 380 government and aided secondary schools for the new approach, and $1,000 had been allocated for each government and aided primary school with a student guidance teacher.