steps towards a healthy school Erasmus Project

Project Title

steps towards a healthy school

Project Key Action

This project related with these key action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices

Project Action Type

This project related with this action type : School Exchange Partnerships

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2020

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Quality Improvement Institutions and/or methods (incl. school development); Social dialogue; Health and wellbeing

Project Summary

Like all schools involved in the project, the Europaschule sees health education and health prevention as an essential focus of its educational work and has taken various steps in this direction. It shares the experience with the other project schools that health is a significant factor for commitment and school success. A lack of exercise, unbalanced diet and increasing stress in school and family environment are major health risks for the pupils of our schools. The main goal for our pupils is the development of health literacy, understood as “[…] a knowledge-based condition for a health-promoting lifestyle” (Abel & Bruhin, 2003). We are of course aware that this is essentially characterized by family, friends, education and socio-cultural background. Nevertheless, schools have a responsibility and concrete approaches to promote this competence. With this project we want to accentuate this part of the educational task. Our primary goal here is to promote health-relevant behaviour in the school setting and thus – to improve the habits and lifestyles of our pupils in terms of health competence. In addition our claim is to involve not only the young people but also the teachers and parents equally in the planned measures. If health promotion and prevention are to be implemented in a sustainable manner, health-promoting processes must be structurally anchored and evaluated on a long-term basis/ permanently. We want to achieve this structural anchoring by initiating and implementing the “Participation Health Teams“ (called “B teams”). In these teams, all groups involved in school life are represented: pupils, parents, guardians and teachers. The task of the B-Teams is to initiate, plan, implement and evaluate concrete necessary steps and actions in the schools. Within the framework of the training, teaching and learning activities (AULs) of the project, the participating pupils and teachers receive impulses and concrete ideas which can incorporated into the work of the participating teams. By placing health education measures on a broad basis in this way, we expect greater acceptance and also greater sustainability. As the B teams act as “multipliers”, we expect the project to benefit the entire school community of the project schools. With the B-team, each of the participating schools also has the opportunity to accentuate health education according to its own specific requirements and school development programme priorities. In terms of content, the planned measures and activities can be differentiated into: a) Behaviour-oriented measures: These concentrate on the individual person and aim to promote health-conscious behaviour, for example with the emphasis on stress management, diet, exercise or relaxation. The AULs C2, C3, C5 and C6 enable ten pupils each from every partner schools to deal with different aspects of behaviour-oriented measures. In addition to teaching basic knowledges, the focus is on getting to know, trying out and evaluating concrete measures and activities. As these should then be implemented directly by peer-to-peer learning or indirectly via the B-teams at the schools, in addition/ additionally the question of moderation and communication of the contents at the schools will also be discussed. b) Relational measures: These are aimed at the living conditions of the individual what means the support of health-promoting conditions such as the initiation or expansion of networks for leisure activities, the re-accentuation of school meals in the direction of “healthy diet” or training of parents in the sense of dealing appropriately with children’s stress at school. Of course, this aspect comes into play/ gets important again and again in the context of behaviour-oriented measures. Nevertheless, we would like to explicitly focus on it in the AULs C1, C4 and C7. Initially, concrete measures are to be discussed at the level of the teachers, which will then be reflected in the schools. At the end of the project, a variety of measures and activities that were carried out and evaluated by the project schools within the project will be discussed. We will publish this fund on an internet platform so that not only the school communities of the project schools but also the interested public can access it. The media will be a various materialpool, ranging from podcasts, digital recipes, short video sequences with explanations, challenges, presentations and blogs. “Steps towards a healthy school” – This title was deliberately chosen because we assume that health prevention is an integral part of school development, but at the same time it is a process that will never be completed. In this respect, the project schools assume that the project applied for here will enable them to take important steps along this path, steps that will have to be continued after the project has ended. Through the structures established within the framework. We hope to have set sustainable development in motion.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 199241 Eur

Project Coordinator

Sekundarschule Kamp-Lintfort & Country: DE

Project Partners

• Luunja Secondary School
• Comunidad en el colegio San Buenaventura de Arta-Franciscanos de la TOR
• III LICEUM OGOLNOKSZTALCACE Z ODDZIALAMI MISTRZOSTWA SPORTOWEGO IM. ZBIGNIEWA HERBERTA W ZORACH
• Sehit Abdulkadir Yuzbasioglu Ortaokulu
• Agrupamento de Escolas de Pedome