SHE4AHA Newsletter #2

Welcome to the SHE4AHA-project!

Welcome to the second issue of the newsletter for the SHE4AHA project, which is an EU project supported financially by the ERASMUS + programme.

SHE4AHA stands for “School health in Europe for Active and Healthy Ageing”, and is a collaborative partnership between partners from Denmark, Iceland, France, Portugal and Slovenia.

The overall aim of the project is to contribute to the European challenge regarding the demographic change and healthy ageing. SHE4AHA works with healthy ageing from early in life, and develops training and good practice examples from 15 schools around Europe, showing how schools can work with health promotion and contribute in a more strategic and holistic way, to the important societal challenge of European citizens staying healthy throughout their lives and into old age.

We invite you to visit our website if you want to know more about the project, the deliverables and the partners, https://healththroughoutlife.eu/

In this newsletter you can read more about some of the concrete pilot projects that we facilitate in local schools. You can also read about a Danish school’s visit to the Icelandic partner, and how the SHE4AHA project has been active in an international research conference.

SHE4AHA is interesting if you...

- are a school manager and want to create strategic changes in your school and become
  a health promoting school
- are a school teacher;
  - wanting to work in different ways with health in the class room – or outside
  - looking for ways to make your teaching more physical active
  - wanting to give more empowerment to your pupils and teach them how to
    make healthy choices in their lives
- are a teacher student teacher, wanting to prepare your students to learn about the
  health promoting schools
- are working in an organization providing vocational training to teachers, seeing a
  potential in teachers knowing about the health promoting school approach

If you want to know more about the SHE4AHA project in the 5 participating countries, you are more than welcome to contact the SHE coordinator in each of the participating country.

Training Day with the Danish Schools

In the autumn of 2023, 15 teachers and school leaders from the three Danish pilot schools gathered for a training day at Fanø. Over the past year, the three schools have initiated various projects to improve the well-being of their pupils. On the day, the teachers presented their work and exchanged experiences and lessons learnt after a year with the EU project SHE4AHA.

At Fanø School, the teachers have learnt that they work well with well-being in the primary school, but that it slips a little in the middle school. Therefore, their goal in participating in the EU project is to create a common thread in the work on well-being that cuts across teachers and grade levels. With this goal in mind, they visited the project partners in Iceland, a trip they also talked about on the day.

At Blåbjergskolen in Varde Municipality, the teachers approached the project a little differently. “When we want to find out what well-being is for our schoolchildren, it’s obvious to ask them and work with them as a starting point,” says Lene Korsgaard, head teacher at Blåbjergskolen.

Through interviews with pupils from different grades, teachers have realised that pupils want more movement during the school day. In the coming period, the teachers will focus on health, where the children will also be involved in defining what health is for them.

At Vitaskolen in Esbjerg Municipality, the school principal and colleagues have chosen to focus on the project in individual classes. Teacher Thomas has made small songs, so-called brain breaks, and a fruit scheme a regular part of everyday life in 2.B. On the day, he explained that the new initiatives will help create small breaks during the school day, increase the children’s knowledge of food and strengthen the community and well-being in the class. And his colleague, Christina work with mindfulness and movement in the class room as an way to keep the pupils calm, focused and engaged – especially in the afternoon.

“It was really inspiring to hear about the other schools’ projects, and I have also written a few things on the notepad that we will be working on in the future,” says Lene Korsgaard.

Study visit to Iceland

As part of the SHE4AHA project, teachers from Fanø School visited the project partners in Iceland. During the trip, the teachers visited four different primary schools and the Ministry of Health, who shared their work with health promoting schools.

In Iceland, 70% of the country’s primary schools participate in a national programme to become health promoting schools. The programme is driven by the schools, so Icelandic schools also have different areas of action and focus that teachers can help shape. Each year, the Icelandic schools choose a specific focus area, which has included: screen time, food, dental care, movement, mindfulness.

“The trip was a great experience and created a bit of envy, because when it comes to creating wellbeing in primary schools, they are way ahead of us. We have gained a greater understanding of our own project and a belief that the projects we initiate can also succeed at our school,” says Jeppe Valbjørn, international coordinator at Fanø School.

For Jeppe Valbjørn and his colleagues, it was also great to experience what theory looks like in practice.

“We were able to the theory that we brought from our training days in SHE4AHA in the schools in Iceland. During the visit, we realised that what we are doing in this project makes sense, because we could see that working with student well-being works. It was great and gave us the incentive to continue working on the project as soon as we were back at the school,” he says.

Back at the school on Fanø, the teachers presented their experiences to their colleagues, who showed great interest in the experiences from Iceland.

“The project has grown at the school, but it’s also important for us that our colleagues themselves want to work with student well-being in a new way, that it’s not something we decide they should be a part of,” he says.

Therefore, they will develop an inspiration catalogue for colleagues to show them how they can work with student well-being in everyday life.

French schools bring people together

The 3 french pilot schools are located in the small town Firminy, near Saint Etienne. All three schools work on the same themes, and it was decided to develop different projects around sport and citizenship, conflict management and links with partners.

“One of the schools organised an Olympic event to work on citizenship. In another, the flexible classroom is being explored to work on school climate and pupil well-being. The aim is to layout the classroom to better meet pupils needs. The pupils can choose between different tables and chairs, but also decide to work alone, in pairs or in small groups,” (…)

In the last pilot school, noticing that not all of their young pupils were eating in the morning, the staff decided to propose a breakfast activity.

“The idea is to associate the parents and to make it a regular event, that takes place every Friday before each holiday break. The objective of this pilot project is to reinforce the relations and the partnership between families and school,” (…)

In addition, all schools in Firminy, although not involved in the project, have been following the work done in the SHE4AHA project and they are working along the same topics, and the communication and links with the townhall have developed and other partnerships have ensued.

“For instance, the after-school club has been working with the schools to propose well-being activities. The local community centre and the schools are beginning to work together in developing workshops and other activities for the children and the parents. The parents also wish to be more involved in coordinated actions between the schools and the parent teacher associations. And pupils are showing more interest in health and well-being through participation in different project,” (…)

All three schools have thus reported similar experiences. And this has sparked their willingness to explore other avenues and more projects within the health promoting schools framework.

How do you eat an elephant?

From the work with the 15 pilot schools in the project, through training and coaching in relation to the implementation of their local pilot projects, the SHE4AHA partners have learned, that it can be very overwhelming for schools to work with the health the promoting school approach on a very general level. Such a strategic process as the HPS approach proposes is ideal and good, but for most of the pilot schools, dealing with daily challenges close to the children and to their work as teachers, makes much more sense. Becoming a health promoting school based on substantial strategic process elaborating assessments and baseline reports, seems to be a mission which is too big and with an objective which is too far away.

Based on experiences from the SHE coordinators in e.g Iceland, Slovenia and Portugal, who have very well-structured networks, programmes and activities, show that it takes several years to become a health promoting school. What seems to be the best approach to motivate schools to participate in activities that lead them on the way to work more strategically with health promotion, is to provide practical oriented training, where exercises are included which give them an opportunity to relate the training to their everyday challenges. From there, they will be able to start working with these challenges, which can start flourish into more strategic considerations in the school.

Project manager Anette Schulz agrees by saying “We have seen this process in all three schools in Denmark. “They have started with smaller pilot projects that motivated a number of teachers. Their learning, engagement and motivation has led to colleagues being interested in what was going on, and it has created a kind of ripple effect” What is important is that the school manager is involved, as her or she can lift the activities up to a more strategic level. Experiences from the project show, that the school manager learns together with the teachers and becomes more and more engaged and convinced that working with health promotion can create changes and innovation in the entire school. It is just like eating an elephant, Anette Schulz says; “you cannot eat it all at once, you have to start with small pieces, that are digestible for you”.

What comes next?

Based on the experiences in the 5 pilot countries, an updated set of training materials are being developed. Going from focusing mostly on the HPS strategic approaching, the final version of the training will focus on a large number of themes that have shown to be interesting for the schools. These are for example, social inequality in health, action competences, health literacy and lifeskills.

The updated material will be ready in early summer.

The SHE4AHA partners are also using all the experiences from the project to develop good practice stories from the 15 participating schools, which can be used as inspiration material for other schools around Europe. “The best way to learn is most often to learn from others, and to see what they have done”, says Anette Schulz.

Last but not least, the SHE4AHA project will produce a position paper in response to the Green Paper on Ageing – Fostering Solidarity and Responsibility between Generations, where a call was put forward to look for solutions to promote healthy ageing from childhood. The Health Promoting School approach is definitely a good solution, and the partners behind the SHE4AHA project wants to show this to the Commission and the member states.

So make sure to follow us on https://healththroughoutlife.eu/ where all the material will be published.