An Australian program designed to stop teenagers vaping has proved to be one of the few successful anti-vaping interventions in the world. A research paper published earlier this year in the Lancet Public Health journal found students in a trial were 65 per cent less likely to vape in the year after they went through the OurFutures Vaping program. The trial also found improvements in the teenagers’ knowledge related to vaping on all follow-up occasions over the following 12 months.
“Translating knowledge into behaviour change is something that is quite rare and we don’t often see,” says program lead Lauren Gardner, at the University of Sydney’s Matilda Centre for Research in Mental Health and Substance Use. “It’s one of only a few programs in the world that has actually shown an impact on vaping behaviour.” OurFutures Vaping is a four-lesson course delivered in health education classes in years seven and eight of high school. Each anti-vaping lesson includes a 20-minute cartoon and about 20 minutes of teacher-facilitated class activities. Fact sheets are supplied.
More than 800 schools have already rolled out the free course, reaching about 180,000 students.
Vaping has surged among Australian school students over the past several years. “Since 2019 it tripled; in the last few years, we’ve really seen it start to surge,” Gardner adds. “It’s quite a serious and prevalent problem.” A 2025 national survey conducted by the Cancer Council found 14.6 per cent of teenagers between the ages of 14 and 17 had vaped, but the swift uptake was now slowing.
Regulations now in place ban the sale of the colourful disposable vapes and fruity flavours enjoyed by teenagers.
“There’s some recent evidence showing that we’re starting to see a positive shift after those regulations were put into place,” Gardner says. “But having said that, it’s still unacceptably high. In addition to the supply reduction strategies, we really need to be putting in place effective demand reduction approaches like the OurFutures vaping program, so we’re actually getting in there and stopping young people from wanting them in the first place.”
Smoking rates for young Australians have been relatively low for a long time and, while vaping is considered less damaging than smoking tobacco, it has been associated with lung problems, mental health difficulties and nicotine addiction. “For young people, the healthiest choice is always going to be to stay vape-free,” Gardner says.
The OurFutures Institute offers educational courses on drugs, alcohol and health education, so tackling vaping seemed a natural fit. The Matilda Centre experts began with a systematic review of global studies to see if there had been any successful school-based interventions targeting vaping anywhere in the world. They found a few, and none in Australia.
“We were able to fast-track a response by building on an effective, school-based prevention model that we know works for preventing alcohol and other drug use in Australia,” Dr Gardner says.
The OurFutures model has been evaluated in eight large, randomised controlled trials, which found it had been effective in preventing alcohol, cannabis and MDMA use and in improving mental health.
“We were actually seeing large, lasting effects into adulthood,” Gardner says, “so up to age 20 for students who got these programs in early high school.”