Health and well-being have mostly been separated from other aspects of school life. Health services and health education have been available for school-aged children in Western societies for a long time. Recently, more comprehensive school health programmes have been developed, e.g. the WHO 'health promoting school' and 'coordinated school health programme' in the USA. They focus on how to implement health promotion and health education in school. However, a theoretically grounded model based on the sociological concept of well-being is needed for planning and evaluation of school development programmes. The School Well-being Model is based on Allardt's sociological theory of welfare and assesses well-being as an entity in school setting. Well-being is connected with teaching and education, and with learning and achievements. Indicators of well-being are divided into four categories: school conditions (having), social relationships (loving), means for self-fulfilment (being) and health status. 'Means for self-fulfilment' encompasses possibilities for each pupil to study according to his/her own resources and capabilities. 'Health status' is seen through pupils' symptoms, diseases and illnesses. Each well-being category contains several aspects of pupils' life in school. The model takes into account the important impact of pupils' homes and the surrounding community. Compared with others, The School Well-being Model's main differences are the use of the well-being concept, the definition of health and the subcategory means for self-fulfilment. Making the outline of the well-being concept facilitates the development of theoretically grounded subjective and objective well-being indicators.

Based on a conceptual model of well-being in school, this study was aimed at exploring factors associated with schoolchildren's general subjective well-being. Classroom data for the School Health Promotion Survey were gathered in 1998 (n = 39 886) and in 1999 (n = 47 455) among eighth and ninth graders (aged 14.3-16.2 years) from 458 secondary schools in different parts of Finland. The dependent variable was the General Subjective Well-being Indicator (GSWI), based on the Raitasalo-modified 13-item Beck Depression Inventory. The independent variables (total 56) included background (grade, socioeconomic status, social cohesion, recreation and health behaviors) and school context (school conditions, social relationships, means for self-fulfillment and health status). The analysis utilized multivariate linear regression modeling. The final model accounted for 22% of boys' and 25% of girls' GSW variation. 'Means for self-fulfillment' (R2 = 0.11 boys, R2 = 0.15 girls), and social relationships in school (R2 = 0.09 boys, R2 = 0.10 girls) and outside school (R2 = 0.09 boys, R2 = 0.11 girls) were the categories showing the strongest correlations with GSW. Grade and socioeconomic status showed only a weak correlation with GSW (R2 = 0.01) among both genders. The study indicated that the school context has a major influence on pupils' general subjective well-being.

Drama, theater and role-playing methods are commonly used in health promotion programs, but evidence of their effectiveness is limited. This paper describes the development, implementation and evaluation of a school-based drama program to enhance social relationships and decrease bullying at school in children in grades 4-5 (mean age of 10.4 years). Students (n = 190) were recruited from two primary schools with similar demographics and socio-economics in the Southern Finland and purposively allocated either to an intervention group or a control group. The drama program included classroom drama sessions, follow-up activities at home and three parents' evenings concerning issues of social well being during the school year September 2007-May 2008. Data on social relationships in the class room and experiences of bullying were obtained before and after the program using self-completed questionnaire from the same students (n = 134). The response rate was 71%. No differences in socio-demographics existed between intervention group and control group at pretest. The positive effect on social relationships resulting from the intervention approached statistical significance (p = 0.065). Moreover, the positive effect was found to be statistically significant in the high-intensity intervention classes (p = 0.011). Bullying victimization decreased 20.7 percentage units from pretest (58.8%) to posttest (38.1%) in the intervention group (p < 0.05). The study indicates that using applied drama and theater methods in the classroom may improve children's social relationships at school.

The aim of this study was to confirm empirically the factor structure of the School Well-being Model. In this Model well-being was divided into school conditions, social relationships, means for self-fulfillment and health status. Data for this study were collected by the School Health Promotion Survey in Finland with 40147 respondents from Grades 8 and 9. The 43 variables from the Survey were fitted into the School Well-being Model using confirmatory factor analysis. The Goodness of Fit Index (GFI) for the four-factor model was 0.93 and GFI Adjusted for Degrees of Freedom was 0.93. The correlations between factors varied from 0.30 to 0.78 and internal consistencies (Cronbach's alphas) from 0.62 to 0.84. The categories school conditions and health status had a good variety of variables. However, the social relationships and the means for self-fulfillment categories would have benefited from additional questions. The School Well-being Model can be utilized to construct school well-being profiles both for groups of pupils and for schools as a whole. The school well-being profile could highlight the area or areas in which schools could make improvements in order to promote the well-being of its pupils.

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