DOZENS of youngsters who are being treated for addiction to alcohol or drugs are under the age of 15, shocking new figures have revealed.

A total of 75 people - 20 girls and 55 boys - required treatment in 2024/25 having become reliant on a substance.

Cannabis was the most prevalent, followed by alcohol, cocaine, ketamine and solvents.

The figures also reveal that 15 children were permanently excluded from school as a result of alcohol or drugs, with 240 suspensions.

Grace Willsher, from support service With You, said: “For those young people more in crisis, we need that detox pathway.

“The safest way to go through it is in an in-patient facility - in terms of the risks involved trying to come off a substance, it’s safer to do that with the right medical professionals around, in a facility.

“But the journey someone has to go through to be in that place, to be ready for detox is huge and a young person will not come to that decision lightly.

“Potentially, they’re leaving friends behind to go to a place that may feel quite clinical, quite scary.

“We know there’s a lot of young people experiencing drug dependency and we put a lot of work into making sure the right professionals are involved and making sure we have a multi-agency approach to supporting them into detox.

“But there are limited places for under-18s, it’s not a quick fix and it takes time trying to find a bed for them, making sure that bed’s available and that young person’s ready and willing to go there.

“I’d like to see a health and social care approach to substance use with young people, less of a criminal approach and more opening up conversation, making sure they feel safe enough to ask questions and get advice.

“I want to be able to continue the early intervention and prevention work we do, going into schools, training professionals and building links with medical professionals like GPs and urology departments.

“If I could wave a magic wand, it would be to bring about so many beds for the detox pathway, with the understanding that the journey a young person goes on to go into detox can be twisty and turny and may go off on a tangent.”

Ms Willsher believes a ‘zero tolerance’ approach to substance misuse from many schools is also among the barriers to young people accessing timely treatment.

She added: “A lot of schools have a ‘just say no’ approach of zero tolerance, so if a young person was found to have cannabis on them, they would immediately be excluded rather than have someone sit down with them and try to understand what’s going on.

“Young people might not want to come forward in school to say they need help due to that fear of being permanently excluded.”