From leadership research to district action: Why school tobacco bans fail: staff engagement in enforcement in Belgian schools

AI-assisted editorial implementation guide. Proposed district actions are separate from the original authors’ findings and recommendations. Independent peer review of this guide is not asserted.

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Evidence and transfer

Education-related source: verify which participants, institutions and outcomes were actually studied before district adoption. Source publication type: research-article. License and identity checks do not establish study quality or causality.

Original authors’ abstract, reproduced under the source license:

Abstract Tobacco control bans are only as effective as their enforcement, and schools are a critical though often overlooked frontline. School tobacco policies (STPs) frequently fail when staff hesitate to act. This study aimed to measure and explain staff engagement in STP enforcement using a newly developed scale. Staff members (n = 624) from 18 Belgian secondary schools took part in the ADHAirE study. Building on previous qualitative studies, we constructed a 10-item scale to assess staff willingness to enforce the STP. We used exploratory factor analysis (EFA) to identify key attitudinal dimensions underlying the scale and conducted multilevel analyses to assess factors that predict enforcement. Participants scored high on willingness to enforce the rules (2.89, range 1–4). EFA revealed two key attitudinal dimensions, each explaining 20% of the variance: the perception that enforcement is a professional role, which was widely endorsed, and sharedness of rules, for which there was less adherence: only half of the participants felt supported by parents, and 40% believed tobacco control was not a school priority. Notably, enforcement was predicted by the perception that rules are enforced by one’s colleagues and the sense that the rules are justified. Bans are likely to be enforced if they are perceived as part of the staff’s professional role and are shared among the school community. Effective enforcement of school smoking bans requires a shared commitment that integrates school staff, leadership, and parents. The validated scale offers a tool for school principals or health authorities to assess that alignment. Keywords: smoke-free policies, implementation, school, staff, enforcement

Study methods

This study is based on baseline data from the ADHAirE (A Decent and Healthy Air for Everyone) experimental study. Data were collected in secondary schools in the Hainaut province, Belgium. This province is known to have a high prevalence of smoking (22% current smokers vs. 19.4% in Belgium) despite smoking at school being prohibited since 2006. The study received ethical approval from the Comité d’éthique hospitalo-facultaire UCLouvain (reference number 2023/30OCT/438). Further details of the methodological features of the ADHAirE study can be found elsewhere (Laloux et al. 2025). The study follows STROBE standards of reporting (Additional file 1).

Limitations

To our knowledge, this is the first study to quantify and analyse the willingness of school staff to enforce STPs using a large sample of staff from different schools in an area where smoking remains prevalent. The study’s main limitation is its geographical reach, as we conducted the survey in a specific Belgian province with high deprivation and frequent smoking. Further studies could test the developed scale in other countries and regions to assess its generalizability and compare the results. Only two dimensions were captured from the scale, however, so a shorter version, with fewer items, could also be tested. The interpretation of the results may also be limited by a reporting bias, for example, non-smoking is reported due to its social desirability. The prevalence of smoking in our sample, however, is similar to that observed among individuals with comparable educational levels in the same province (Gisle and Demarest 2025). Another limitation concerns the variation in the response rate between schools (ranging from 1 to 55%). Nevertheless, supplementary analyses did not reveal any associations between schools’ response rates and schools’ SES, students’ or staff’s smoking prevalence, smoking visibility, gender proportion, or mean age of school staff (Additional file 4). These variables, therefore, do not indicate selection biases.

A 90-day district inquiry

Days 1–15 · Appraise. Read the source methods, recruitment, comparator, outcomes and limitations. Record how the study setting differs from your district and which claim the design can support.
Days 16–30 · Design. Choose one school improvement question with teachers. Protect a short shared planning cycle, agree an instructional change and use a common rubric for examining student work. Agree participation, privacy protections, baseline and stopping rules before starting.
Days 31–60 · Observe. Collect the pre-agreed measures, keep a log of implementation changes and invite confidential voluntary feedback. Preserve existing support for staff and learners.
Days 61–90 · Decide. Review implementation fidelity, teacher time and independently scored student work against a recorded baseline. Examine access differences and competing explanations before attributing changes to leadership. Make a dated decision to stop, revise or extend the inquiry.

Board decision brief

Present the local problem, source setting, evidence limits, intervention, responsible owner, total cost, measured changes and uncertainty. Separate staff perceptions, implementation measures and student learning outcomes.

Attribution and reuse

Pierre Laloux; Arja Rimpelä; Vincent Lorant. Why school tobacco bans fail: staff engagement in enforcement in Belgian schools. Health Promotion International (2026-03-01). https://doi.org/10.1093/heapro/daag031

Prepared 2026-11-07. Source authorship and DOI are preserved. The abstract and source passages are attributed extracts; this editorial guide is offered under the same CC BY 4.0 license.