Toward the Creation of Healthy Schools: Constructing a School Health Partnership Model for Student Well-being to Inspire and Guide Public Health and Education Professionals, at All Levels, and Mental Health Leads
Creators: name: De Montigny, Joanne G
Publisher: name: Université d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa
Year: 2019
Subjects: comprehensive school health
healthy schools
intersectoral partnership
cross-sector collaboration
health promotion
model
children
youth

description: Over twenty years ago, the World Health Organization launched a health promoting school movement as part of its settings approach to creating healthy environments. Partnerships across the public health and education sectors are vitally important in efforts to improve the health of children and youth in a school setting. In support of this principle, major advancements have been made within Ontario’s education sector, such as mandating local school systems to incorporate the goal of student well-being into their improvement plans and promoting the use of their Foundations for a Healthy School framework. Furthermore, the provincial ministries of education and health are actively encouraging the strengthening of local school health partnerships. However, there is a lack of knowledge within the health promoting school literature as to how to go about establishing well-functioning partnerships within local school systems. To address this problem, the thesis project aimed to generate knowledge about partnerships between public health professionals and local school system actors, and to shed light on the potential for collaboration toward the creation of healthy schools. Before embarking on this thesis project, however, a conceptual framework was developed to gain a firm understanding of cross-sector collaboration for social change, since collaboration represents a partnership at the highest level of engagement. Two other literature reviews were carried out to understand further the partnership component of health promoting school models, and to show the extent of the knowledge gap existing in this area. The literature review on health promoting schools identifies, to a limited extent, the fundamental elements that specifically constitute school health partnerships at both the school and school board levels. Likewise, the scoping review that examines the knowledge-base on the different types of partnership for health promotion within school systems revealed an absence of in-depth knowledge on this topic. When setting out to fill this knowledge gap, an exploratory research methodology that was primarily qualitative in design was chosen. It included a participatory orientation, whereby a research steering committee of 10 public health managers provided guidance with the formulation of the research question, and with the data collection and interpretation stages of the research project’s public health sector phase. An online survey of school health partnership actors from all 36 Ontario public health units was carried out, along with semi-structured interviews with key school health informants from 32 of these public health units and from six school boards in the province. Although the contribution from the education sector was not as pronounced, school board participants corroborated the findings from participating public health professionals and provided additional insights to gain a clearer understanding of partnership challenges and how to strengthen school health partnerships. Thematic analysis of the collected data was performed based on both deductive and inductive reasoning. From the public health perspective, a school health partnership model for student well-being was constructed. This model was enhanced to some extent by the views of school board representatives. It is composed of two dimensions: the Partnership Generator, and the Collaboration Continuum. The Partnership Generator comprises four inter-related components, namely cross-sector engagement, connection, capacity, and continuity, with relationship building at its core. The cross-sector engagement component encompasses various elements that enrich engagement across the public health and education sectors, while the other three components consist of those elements that enable this engagement. The connection elements motivate school health partners to engage, whereas the capacity elements determine the extent to which engagement can take place. Finally, the elements that make up the continuity component maintain the momentum that motivated cross-sector engagement created based on the capacity that was made available through this engagement. Each of these elements contribute to a school health partnership’s strength. The Collaboration Continuum dimension refers to school health partners’ movement from one partnership arrangement to the next, with increasingly more extensive levels of cross-sector engagement. It includes three sets of supporting conditions to promote movement along the continuum, going from networking to cooperation and then to collaboration. The resulting model provides the knowledge base for assessing the strengths of a given school health partnership and for shedding light on which partnership areas would need to be further developed. Overall, this model offers any professional, from the field of public health, education, or mental health, a closer look at what would be required for a school health partnership to become truly collaborative and reach its maximum potential. It promises to inspire and guide school health partners in their pursuit of more meaningful engagement with one another toward greater improvements in the well-being of school-age children, in recognition of their shared responsibility.