英国の学校における健康教育の政策と実態

― PSHEとヘルシースクール政策の分析を通じて ―

抄録

By World Health Organization （WHO） ’s initiatives, many countries have been working on health promotion in schools since the late 1980s. According to the WHO, Health Promoting Schools stem from the idea of healthy settings. A healthy setting refers to“the place or social context in which people engage in daily activities in which environmental, organizational, and personal factors interact to affect health and wellbeing.” In other words, this idea tries to see settings, where people engage in activities, as a place where health-related problems are created and resolved. The idea of using settings as a base to tackle health promotion stems from a strategy from the 1980s,“Health for All,” and more specifically, it was designed more clearly in the 1986 Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion. Currently, health promotion initiatives are implemented in settings such as schools, workplace, hospitals, villages and cities. 　In the compulsory education stage in England there is a subject called PSHE （Personal, Social, Health and Economic education）． This subject is expected to play a central role in health education. Also, there are requirements that a variety of subjects, such as science, physical education and design and technology, teach knowledge and skills related to health. Health and safety prescriptions have occurred in the Early Years Foundation Stage （EYFS）， with such descriptions increasing in recent years. Regardless of the fact that heavy emphasis has been placed on PSHE as a subject closely involved in better lifestyles for children, to date, it has been a non-statutory subject. As a result, individual schools decide how to teach PSHE, and quality has also been found to vary, with a 2013 survey by Ofsted finding 40% of schools needing improvement. With increasing voices calling for a PSHE requirement in all schools, as it brings a certain level of quality, the current Conservative government announced that PSHE would become a statutory subject in 2019. As seen in the current positioning of PSHE, while the government has endorsed health education in England, efforts toward this end have been decided by each school. However, there are policies to promote schools undertaking ambitious efforts for health education. Among them is the healthy schools approach. A healthy school is one with evidence that it is undertaking schoolwide efforts concerning the four central themes of PSHE, healthy food, physical activity and emotional health and well-being. The Labour Government at the time built an environment enabling schools to make aspiring health education efforts through nationwide development of a healthy school’s certification program for these schools. Although this wasn’t adopted under subsequent coalition and Conservative Governments, in some cases, local authorities use healthy school policies to continue to support healthy lifestyles among children in their respective regions. For example, in the Healthy Schools London policy, health education in schools develops through cooperation with local authority and a variety of groups promoting health. A wide variety of health education is taught in schools. These cases indicate that schools wisely using local resources can develop effective and original health education.