By Susan M. Sawyer, Monika Raniti, and Ruth Aston, The Lancet Child & Adolescent Health, June 25, 2021
In the past year, the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on schools has reinforced the profound links between children's health, wellbeing, and learning. In addition to deleterious effects on student engagement, learning outcomes, and educational transitions, there is growing evidence of the impact of school closures on children's and adolescents' emotional distress and mental health.1 There are also concerns that students with mental health disorders are at greater risk of permanently disengaging from education, negatively affecting their future earning potential. Social inequalities risk being similarly compounded in other contexts, with growing fears that family socioeconomic pressures are contributing to students not returning to school due to pressures to work or marry. At no other time has there been such an appreciation of the value of schools as sites for academic and social learning, and settings that can enhance student health and wellbeing.
In 1986, the Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion provided a context for schools to be conceived as communities for creating empowered, engaged, and healthy students who are connected to families and local neighbourhoods. Consistent with this, in 1995 WHO conceptualised a health-promoting school as “a school that is constantly strengthening its capacity as a healthy setting for living, learning and working”.2 Other frameworks and terms, such as comprehensive school health and healthy school communities, share the essential features of health-promoting schools—namely, that these frameworks and terms extend the delivery of a health education curriculum, or a discrete health intervention or programme (including a health service), to encompass the whole school curriculum and the broader ethos and environment of the school in ways that intentionally engage parents, carers, families, and the wider local community.3 These whole-school approaches have been shown to have clear benefits for learning, health, and wellbeing.
Comments (0)