Health promoting schools:
A health promoting school can be characterized as a school constantly strengthening its capacity as a healthy setting for living, learning and working.
Reference: Promoting health through schools. Report of a WHO Expert Committee on Comprehensive School Health Education and Promotion. WHO Technical Report Series N°870. WHO, Geneva, 1997
Towards this goal, a health promoting school engages health and education officials, teachers, students, parents and community leaders in efforts to promote health. It fosters health and learning with all the measures at its disposal, and strives to provide supportive environments for health and a range of key school health education and promotion programs and services. A health promoting school implements policies, practices and other measures that respect an individual’s self-esteem, provide multiple opportunities for success, and acknowledge good efforts and intentions as well as personal achievements. It strives to improve the health of school personnel, families and community members as well as students, and works with community leaders to help them understand how the community contributes to health and education.
WHO’s Global School Health Initiative aims at helping all schools to become “health promoting” by, for example, encouraging and supporting international, national and subnational networks of health promoting schools, and helping to build national capacities to promote health through schools.
