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Supporting
strategies » Examples
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The 1990s was the decade of Education for All
(EFA). The World Declaration on Education for
All (Jomtien 1990) envisioned that "Every person - child,
youth and adult - shall be able to benefit from educational
opportunities designed to meet their basic learning needs." The
global community reunited in Dakar, April 2000, to assess progress
of the EFA decade and to renew its commitment to Education for All
by 2015. Strategies for meeting this goal are outlined in the
Dakar Framework for Action, Education for All: Meeting our
Collective Commitments, and include the creation of safe,
healthy, inclusive and equitably resourced educational environments
conducive to excellence in learning.
Two of the EFA goals relate directly to life
skills education:
Goal #3: Ensure that the learning needs of
all young people and adults are met through equitable access to
appropriate learning and life skills programmes;
Goal #6: Improve every aspect of the quality
of education, and ensure their excellence so that recognized and
measurable learning outcomes are achieved by all, especially in
literacy, numeracy and essential life skills.
EFA 2000 Assessment: Thematic Study on School Health
and Nutrition includes a summary and examples of effective
strategies, including skills-based health education. |
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ICPD
ICPD+5 represents the 5-year review
and appraisal of the implementation of the International
Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) Programme of
Action. The 1999 conference was successful in establishing the first
specific global target against HIV, with supporting strategies
significant to achieving the goal:
Global Goal
- to achieve 25% reduction in HIV infection
rates among young people in the most affected countries by
2005, and globally by 2010.
Supporting Strategy
- to ensure the right of young people to
accurate information and education to prevent and cope with the
effects of HIV/AIDS
Thus, ICPD+5 identified education as a
central pillar of action in supporting prevention of HIV/AIDS among
young people, and school-based health
education is a specific tool for achieving this. |
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Convention on the Rights
of the Child
Children's rights are most fully articulated
in the Convention
on the Rights of the Child. Created over a period of ten
years with the input of representatives from different societies,
religions and cultures, the Convention was adopted as an
international human rights treaty on 20 November 1989. The
Convention is the most universally accepted human rights instrument
in history. For a skills-based approach to learning about the
Convention, see UNICEF's "It's Only Right! A practical guide to
learning about the convention on the rights of the child", available
from the Education Section at UNICEF, New
York. |
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UNICEF's
framework of rights-based, child-friendly
schools
UNICEF has developed a framework for rights-based,
child-friendly
educational systems and schools that are characterized as "inclusive, healthy and protective for all children,
effective with children, and involved with families and communities - and
children" (Shaeffer, 1999). Within this
framework:
 The school is a significant personal and social environment
in the lives of its students. A child-friendly shool ensures every child
an environment that is physically safe, emotionally secure and
psychologically enabling;
Teachers are the single most important factor in creating
an effective and inclusive classroom.
Children are natural learners, but this capacity to learn
can be undermined and sometimes destroyed. A child-friendly school
recognizes, encourages and supports children's growing capacities as
learners by providing a school culture, teaching behaviours and curriculum
content that are focused on learning and the learner.
The ability of a school to be and to call itself
child-friendly is directly linked to the support, participation and
collaboration it receives from families.
Child-friendly schools aim to develop a learning
environment in which children are motivated and able to learn. Staff
members are friendly and welcoming to children and attend to all their
health and safety needs.
Child-friendly schools strive for quality in
the following five areas
Quality learners: healthy, well-nourished,
ready to learn, and supported by their family and community
Quality content: curricula and materials for
literacy, numeracy, knowledge, attitudes, and skills for life
Quality teaching-learning processes:
child-centred; (life) skills-based approaches, technology
Quality learning environments: policies and
practices, facilities (classrooms, water, sanitation), services (safety,
physical and psycho-social health)
Quality outcomes: knowledge, attitudes and
skills; suitable assessment, at classroom and national levels
And they are gender-sensitive
throughout
Child-friendly schools PowerPoint
presentation
More
details on child-friendly schools
Focusing
Resources on Effective School Health (FRESH)
Positive experiences by WHO, UNICEF, UNESCO and the
World Bank suggest that there is a core group of cost-effective components
of a school health, hygiene and nutrition program, which can form the
basis for intensified and joint action to make schools healthy for
children. These agencies have developed a partnership for Focusing
Resources on Effective School Health. The FRESH approach was
launched at the World Education Forum in Senegal, April 2000. Working
together to Focus Resources for Effective School Health (FRESH), the
agencies call for the following four components to be made available in
all schools:
Health-related
policies. School-based policies should ensure a safe and secure
physical environment and a positive psyochosocial environment and should
address issues such as the abuse of students, sexual harassment, school
violence and bullying.
Safe water and sanitation facilities, as first
steps in creating a healthy school environment.
Skills-based health education. This approach to
health, hygiene and nutrition education focuses on the development of
knowledge, attitudes, values and life skills needed to make and act on the
most appropriate and positive decisions concerning health.
School-based health and nutrition services. Schools
can effectively deliver some health and nutritional services as long as
the services are simple, safe and familiar, and address problems that are
prevalent and recognized as important in the community
Supporting strategies for achieving the above
include effective partnerships between
Education and health sectors
Teachers and health workers
Schools and community groups
Pupils and persons responsible for school health
programmes
More information about FRESH is available at http://www.schoolsandhealth.org/FRESH.htm. Details about
the different components of FRESH can be found in "School Health at a
Glance", March 2001, available on the World Bank
Health-Nutrition-Population web site: www.worldbank.org/hnp. (Click "Public Health at a
Glance")
WHO's
concept of a Health-Promoting School
The World Health Organization (WHO), through its Global School
Health Initiative, promotes the concept of a Health-Promoting
School. A Health-Promoting School can be characterized as a school that is
constantly strengthening its capacity as a healthy setting for living,
learning and working. It does this by:
Fostering health and learning with all the measures at its
disposal;
Engaging health and education officials, teachers,
teachers' unions, students, parents, health providers and community
leaders in efforts to make the school a healthy place;
Striving to provide a healthy environment, school health
education and school health services along with school/community projects
and outreach, health promotion programmes for staff, nutrition and food
safety programmes, opportunities for physical education and recreation,
and programmes for counselling, social support and mental health
promotion;
Implementing policies and practices that respect an
individual's well-being and dignity, provide multiple opportunities for
success, and acknowledge good efforts and intentions as well as personal
achievements;
Strives to improve the health of school personnel, families
and community members as well as students.
From country to country, even within different
regions and communities of one country, schools have distinct strengths
and needs. By building on those strengths and drawing on the imagination
of students, parents, teachers and administrators, every school can find
new ways to improve health and address health problems. This is the heart
of the process of becoming a Health-Promoting School -- one
mechanism for operationalising effective school health programs
(FRESH).
The
Inter-Agency Working Group on HIV/AIDS, Schools and Education
(IAWG)
Comprised of representatives from WHO, UNESCO,
UNICEF, the World Bank, UNFPA, UNDCP and UNDP, the Inter-Agency Working
Group was created to: (1) enhance advocacy on life skills and HIV/AIDS
prevention in schools, especially through documentation, and (2) to
facilitate training on life skills and HIV/AIDS prevention in schools. The
IAWG has recently expanded its focus to also provide leadership for
addressing the impact of HIV/AIDS on the Education Sector and improve the
quality of HIV/AIDS prevention in the education sector. The coordination
role lies within UNICEF.
The IAWG focuses on operationalising global
priorities such as CRC, ICPD+5 and EFA. Specific mechanisms for achieving
these include the frameworks of Child-Friendly Schools, FRESH,
Health-Promoting Schools, and skills-based health education which is a
component of FRESH.
Child Friendly Schools
the vision of what schools should
be
FRESH
the vision of the "healthy" part of a
child-friendly school
Health-Promoting Schools
a strategy for realizing the vision of
FRESH
and contributing to child-friendly
schools
HIV/AIDS is a priority globally and the IAWG has
developed a Strategy
Framework to stimulate discussion and action for an
expanded response to HIV/AIDS through educational systems.
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