THE USE OF SCHOOL SURVEYS IN POLICY AND PREVENTION PLANNING AND EVALUATION Results of the 2022 ESPAD - MedSPAD bridge project

The ESPAD-MedSPAD bridge project is an initiative aimed at assessing the use of school surveys in policy and prevention planning and evaluation across more than 40 countries in the European and Mediterranean regions. The project has been funded by the Council of Europe - Pompidou Group (PG-CoE) under the 2022 work programme of the Mediterranean Cooperation Network on drugs and addictions (MedNET), supported by the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA) and carried out under the scientific lead of the Italian National Research Council (CNR) with the collaboration of the EMCDDA. ESPAD is an independent research project supported by EMCDDA and conducted by research teams in more than 40 European countries with the overall aim to collect comparable data on substance use and other risk behaviours among 15- to 16-year-old students. MedSPAD is a project set up, designed and funded by the Pompidou Group of the Council of Europe. This project, which is an adaptation of ESPAD, is aimed at building capacity and developing effective tools for monitoring youth substance use and risk behaviours in countries of the Southern Mediterranean region. The current initiative aims to exploit the synergy between the two projects to provide an improved understanding of how school surveys are being used in policy and prevention planning and evaluation, with a special focus on the ESPAD and MedSPAD surveys .