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Abstract: Health promotion uses a range of complementary approaches to provide individuals and communities with knowledge that will enable them to improve their own health and wellbeing. Encouraging children to adopt healthy lifestyle habits is a central objective, and health promotion at a community level, particularly through health promoting schools, may be an effective strategy. Health promoting schools are well within the capacity of even poor countries, as they focus on the school and its culture, and establishing health promoting schools requires a change in mindset and refinement of educational investment rather than the provision of major new resources, engagement of non-government organizations or obtaining international funding. A consensus of current evidence and essential concepts underlying health promotion in schools, principles that contribute to success or failure, and opportunities for implementation and engagement is presented, based on shared experience and dialogue at a 2011 international colloquium held at Stellenbosch University. (Global Health Promotion, 2013; 20(1): 78-81)
Keywords: children, youth, education, health promotion, schools, education settings, community
Introduction
A total of forty people from five continents came together for a colloquium entitled 'Many voices, one song. Health-promoting schools: evidence strategies, challenges, and prospects' at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study at Stellenbosch University, in South Africa, from 9 to 11 November 2011. This was one of a series of International Colloquia Abroad sponsored by the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. As indicated by its title, the purpose was to share the global and regional experience of participants related to their work using a health promoting school model. The World Health Organization (WHO) defines a health promoting school as one that constantly strengthens its capacity as a healthy setting for living, learning and working (1). Health promoting schools use 'a whole-school approach to enhance the health and educational outcomes of children and adolescents through teaching and learning experiences initiated in the schools' (2,3), and have great potential to positively impact children worldwide as they establish the school 'as a healthy setting for living, learning and working' (4,5). As a result of this dialogue, the following consensus statement was prepared as a benchmark of the current status of health promoting schools and an overview of future directions for...