The physical school environment: An essential component of a health-promoting school

Overview

“The children of today are the adults of tomorrow. They deserve to inherit a safer and healthier world. There is no task more important than safeguarding their environment.” This message is emphasized by the Healthy Environments for Children Alliance (HECA), which focuses attention on the school environment as one of the key settings for promoting children’s environmental health. HECA was launched at the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development. This publication is intended as a tool to help schools shape healthy environments for children.

The Physical School Environment: An Essential Component of a Health-Promoting School focuses on the physical environment of the school and is complemented by the document Creating an Environment for Social and Emotional Well-being: An Important Responsibility of a Health-Promoting and Child-Friendly School. Together, these two resources can help schools provide an environment that is supportive of the World Health Organization’s definition of health, “… a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity”.

The Physical School Environment: An Essential Component of a Health-Promoting School includes information to create a healthy school environment, and to identify and modify aspects of the physical environment that jeopardize safety and health. However, physical interventions alone will not suffice. The document also contains guidance to ensure that positive changes in a school’s physical environment are supported, reinforced and sustained by school health policy, skills-based health education and school health services, the core components of an effective school health programme as called for in the international initiative to Focus Resources on Effective School Health (FRESH).

The extent to which each nation’s schools provide a safe and healthy physical environment plays a significant role in determining whether the next generation is educated and healthy. Effective school health programmes, including a safe and healthy school environment, are viable means to simultaneously address the inseparable goals of Health for All and Education for All.