When Amy Winehouse passed away from alcohol poisoning in 2011, many people asked “how had this been allowed to happen?” Asif Kapadia’s AMY, a polarizing biopic of the late singer, released last month, brought many of these ideas and questions flooding back. With an addiction as public as hers, it seems astonishing and tragic that the inevitable wasn’t prevented, or that there were no steps in place that could have helped her.

When you take fame out of the equation, Amy Winehouse’s story obviously isn’t specific to her. According to DrugScope, there are around quarter of a million people in the UK addicted to crack and heroin, with the figures for other types of addiction harder to gauge, and obviously much higher. And although there are addiction help centres and rehabs dotted around the country, maybe it’s more about educating young people before it gets to the point that they’ll need them. At least that’s what the people who run the Amy Winehouse Foundation (the charity set up in the late singer’s name) think.

To that end, the charity launched a scheme last year with 87 trained volunteers and 60 people training to become qualified. These volunteers – all former addicts themselves – have been visiting schools around the country to give talks about addiction and the emotions that come with it.

“The consistent message they got from people in rehab was that they’d never had any constructive education in school about drugs and alcohol,” Dominic Ruffy, the programme director, told the Guardian. “They’d had policemen in. They’d been told, ‘Don’t do this, don’t do that’, but nobody had ever gone in and talked to them about their feelings and emotions like we do.”

The programme, which has teamed up with specialist addiction charity Addaction, is being supported by a £4.3 million grant from the Big Lottery fund. So far, they have visited schools across 11 regions and they aim to reach 250,000 pupils in the next five years.