Health Education in Schools: How Can We Ensure It Is Accurate, Comprehensive and Inclusive?
Health education in schools has long been identified as a strategy to support children’s health and well-being. However, there are challenges around standardization and quality of health education and how to implement it in schools.
Clinicians and researchers within PolicyLab’s Adolescent Health and Well-being research portfolio identified opportunities for strengthening school health education and ensuring that it is responsive to youth needs, accurate, comprehensive, inclusive and equitably accessible. Grounded in the expertise of pediatric health care providers and researchers, this brief offers relevant research with a focus on work that specifically includes adolescent perspectives and, from it, provides recommendations to inform decision-makers’ discourse on core components of health education.