In recent decades, the core function of education has become increasingly multi-faceted and contested, in part because of external pressures on schools and other learning settings to accommodate an expanding health agenda. A Health Promoting Schools (HPS) framework aims to address health issues holistically, encompassing both physical and mental aspects. Despite receiving global recognition as an evidence-based approach to health and educational improvements, multiple challenges persist, hindering effective HPS implementation at scale. Some authors insist that contrary to the positioning of schools as the ideal setting for health promotion and prevention, highly-marketised education systems contribute to impoverished wellbeing and sub-optimal learning. Specific, school-based stressors include but are not limited to, punitive behaviour policies and practices, high-stakes assessments, failing to meet the needs of SEND pupils and other marginalised groups, lack of student voice, technology-related pressures, and poor psychological understanding among staff. A genuine tension prevails; on the one-hand schools are mandated to be pivotal sites for health promotion, while on the other, systemic pressures and punitive cultures serve to undermine the very wellbeing these institutions should, ideally, engender.
The Research Topic, Holistically Healthy Humans Volume I, brought together an eclectic international authorship to help further our understanding of how education settings are uniquely positioned to promote, nurture, and support holistic wellbeing. Salutogenic approaches designed to strengthen individual, local community, and wider systemic resources have shown enormous potential for creating healthy education ecosystems where all members can thrive. Nonetheless, education institutions are complex systems and a better understanding of some of the key challenges hindering schools and other education spaces from becoming authentic, health promoting ecosystems is urgently warranted. This is the central focus of our second Volume. The goal is to investigate the multiple and deep rooted structural, cultural, and systemic barriers that contribute to the prevailing tension. Addressing this problem will involve unpicking macro-level barriers, cultural and relational factors, resource and capacity issues, and inequities and marginalisation in education and health. Beyond exposing the manifold and multi-level challenges endemic in contemporary education, we are seeking evidence-based approaches, interventions and recommendations that collectively address extant tensions and help to create authentic, health promoting settings.
Contributions to this second Volume are invited on a range of themes related to the broad research topic. Specifically, research papers that will help to further our understanding of salient issues hindering the development of healthy education ecosystems, as well as evidence-based approaches to tackle them. Both primary research studies and systematic and scoping review articles will be welcomed for the current collection. Theoretical and conceptual papers will also be considered. Contributions that focus on a range of learning settings including mainstream, alternative provision, and special schools; as well as other levels of education, such as early years or higher education, are of interest. It is anticipated that this complementary second Volume will generate comprehensive insights and the latest research evidence to inform recommendations for shaping practice and policy directives towards generating and sustaining authentic, health enhancing education settings at scale.
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Keywords: health, physical health, universal wellbeing, education, health promoting settings, barriers to wellbeing
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