Health needs: policy plan and school practice in Greece

Abstract

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to explore the concept of health‐related needs on a policy design and curriculum enactment basis in terms of the national school health education curriculum in Greek secondary education.Design/methodology/approachA single case study, using an ethnographic approach, was conducted in Greece, seeking to understand the continuum from policy design to curriculum enactment in respect of health‐related needs. Three sources of data were used to meet this goal: policy texts, observation, and interviews. Multilevel sampling was employed to select one secondary school as a site for “good practice”. Grounded theory coding, thematic analysis and critical discourse analysis identified themes associated with the idea of health‐related through the corpus of data.FindingsOn a policy plan level the concept of health‐related needs was coupled with and reduced to a predetermined list of health‐related subjects; and the list of health‐related topics had not been updated for long and was characterised by a rather biomedical orientation. On a school practice level the stage of needs assessment was not applied, the list of health‐related subjects advocated in the policy plan was used on a proactive, normative and top down basis, and the students' felt needs tended to be disregarded.Originality/valueThis study followed up the continuum from policy design to school practice regarding the concept and practice of health needs, highlighting the possibilities and the problems from both perspectives.

Mapping out the higher education curricula to locate pre-service teachers training in health education: the case for critical pedagogy

“…The copyright holder for this preprint this version posted June 29, 2023. ; https://doi.org/10.1101/2023.06.24.23291860 doi: medRxiv preprint 1 4 (Soultatou et al, 2023). However, even though those two scholarly works are among the few focused in Greek SHE curricula, both adopt different perspectives than the current one.…”

School Health Services and Health Education Curricula in Greece: Scoping Review and Policy Plan

“…Third, SHE as a subject does not retain a permanent position in school curricula; it has operated as an extracurricular and cross-curricular activity [30,31]. Moreover, SHE operates under the medical hegemony retaining a bio-medical and individualistic character focusing on personal health and disease prevention [16], whereas schoolteachers lack training, experience and leadership from the health education officers [32]. In addition, the optional character of SHE in the school curricula is identified as a barrier to its implementation [31].…”

“…As a field of knowledge, within applied educational practice, it may adopt two distinct forms of curricula implementation: either as a cross-thematic subject within the compulsory timetable or as an extracurricular school activity, outside teaching hours. However, the constant modifications in its pedagogical methods and its place in the school curricula led to further marginalization of health education in schools [ 16 , 22 ].…”

“…School health education is aligned with SHS in that it constitutes the essentially pedagogical tenet of public health traced basically in school setting. SHE may adopt the values of neoliberal public health policies representing public health crises as unique and accidental, concurrently emphasizing individual responsibility, and adopting a victim-blaming perspective [ 16 ]. A new curriculum needs to be devised based on the ideals of democracy, social justice and solidarity and adopting a whole-school, bottom-up, pupil-centered and collaborative methodology.…”