Learning and teaching
Health promoting schools have a curriculum and approaches to learning and teaching that provide appropriate challenge, participation and support for all pupils and have a positive effect on their health and well-being.
PDF file: Being Well – Doing Well (1033KB) (SHPSU, 2004)
Within a health promoting school there are two distinct elements.
- Health education programmes within the formal curriculum, which are delivered both through personal and social education and across other areas of the curriculum.
- Health-related issues which permeate the hidden curriculum, and which affect all members of the school community and beyond.
To move forward with health promotion in school, two questions relating to these elements must be asked.
- What is already happening in the formal curriculum?
- Which parts of the hidden curriculum are integral to a health promoting school?
Using the Quality Indicators from 
Word file: The Health Promoting School (136KB) (HMIE, 2004), the core elements of best practice show a health promoting school as:
- having a culture of support for learning
- making any learning activity relevant and meaningful to the pupils and their experiences
- using a variety of approaches and methodologies
- giving and receiving clear, regular feedback
- monitoring attainment and progress in learning.
Further recommendations for good practice in health promoting schools are given in Health Promotion: Issues for Councils and Schools (HMIE, 1999), as follows:
A health-promoting school will give careful consideration to the range of learning and teaching approaches it uses in all areas of the curriculum and to the circumstances in which particular approaches are employed. In delivering health education it will:
- make appropriate use of active learning, whole-class teaching, related individual work, small-group discussion and collaboration, role-play and simulation activities
- ensure teaching approaches are based as far as possible on an understanding of pupils' health needs and previous learning, making use of pupils' own evaluation of their health needs where appropriate
- consult and involve parents appropriately in its approaches to learning and teaching, particularly in relation to sensitive health-related issues
- offer pupils sound, practical advice that is relevant to their health needs
- take account of significant health issues in the school's local community
- ensure that teaching and learning take place in contexts where pupils can explore health issues safely and openly
- emphasise healthy routines, protection skills and responsible decision making for healthy living
- make appropriate use of peer education where older pupils, having been given training and under appropriate supervision, offer younger pupils good health role-models and opportunities for talking through health issues in an accessible way.
