- Student Financial Literacy (part of a comprehensive health & life skills program (e.g.PSHE in England)
- Creative Thinking & Problem Solving (a generic life skill)
- Rationale, Theory, Framework for a new PISA Survey on Technical- Vocational Education (alternative pathways to student success)
- PISA Results During Covid Pandemic (Student learning during closures, resilience and school program, policy responses)
- The State of Learning and Equity in Education (gender, economic status and immigrants status)
A series of reports on the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment’s (PISA) periodic testing program on student performance. The reports generally compare student (15 year olds) academic performance across countries, or discuss the methodology used to gather the data, Analyses related to school health & development programs include. Go to page listing PISA reports or see these sub-reports
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The National Partnership for Student Success focuses on five types of evidence-based student supports that together meet holistic student needs. These include academic tutors, mentors,post-secondary transition coaches, student success coaches and wraparound integrated student support coordinators. The NPSS Support Hub Resources page lists resources on many school success/stay in school topics, including chronic absenteeism, collaborating with community organizations, high imp[act tutoring, engaging corporate volunteers, post-secondary transition coaches, mentors, and integrated student services coordinators. This map highlights some of the organizations and efforts around the country working in one or more of these five roles to provide students with the academic, social, mental health, and other supports they need. Go to the NPSS web site.
The Canadian government has published a one page infographic explaining Multi-sectoral Collaboration. Go to the infographic.
The compendium has examples from several settings and several issues but they do not include using schools as the hub. The brief analysis of the case studies is very good. For example The four pillars (p11) can be used to update this initial list of WoG good practices. They cover: Governance and accountability, Leadership at all levels, Ways of Working & Resources and capabilities. The Milestones attributed to multisectoral actions in the compendium (p12) are also useful. They include Formalization of coordination mechanisms or other governance platforms, Acceleration of policy changes and programme expansion, Creation of new partnerships as a result of multisectoral collaboration, Improved understanding and awareness of NCDs and their determinants. (or of school programs and issues) and Enhanced knowledge collaboration and information sharing as standard practice. The Insights and lessons learnt section (p14) explains these lessons: Institutionalizing multisectoral actions, Sharing knowledge and data, Recognizing windows of opportunity, Leadership at all levels, Ways of Working to Build Trust, Developing capacity, Empowering government sectors. Go to the compendium
UNESCO & UNICEF have launched the "building strong foundations" initiative promoting education for health and well being in primary schools. The new initiative benefitting learners aged 5-12 in primary school was launched in May 2024 at a symposium in Lusaka, Zambia. It includes four technical briefs that describe what foundational education for health and well-being is, what to teach and how to design content, how to involve the whole school and how to put this work into practice in the classroom. The two-year process began with a literature review, followed by regional online consultations with around 215 stakeholders. Next, a global meeting was held, attended by 60 experts from diverse countries and sectors. Nine key topics have been identified as particularly vital for FEHW:
Other gaps in the list of topics, such as mitigating the human health effects of climate change (e.g. sun safety, recycling), avoiding accidental injury (e.g. road safety), and responding to disasters (e.g. personal & family emergency plan) show the limitations of starting with a list of topics rather than a description of generic skills, knowledge and attitudes in a curriculum within which topics determined and documented to be relevant to the children in the country can be addressed. The UNESCO, UNICEF description of education for HWB in Brief One (p11) states that "An enabling policy environment is also important for the success of FEHW. This implies integrating health and well-being into education sector policies, plans, strategies and resource allocations. Positioning health and well-being as a priority within the formal primary school curriculum is critical." However, we should not confuse a collection of instructional programs with a core curriculum with a mandated set of learning objectives. Examples of such core curricula in health, life skills/personal & social development and/or home economics can be found in the USA, England, and most jurisdictions, including the jurisdictions where the officials and experts contributing to UNESCO-UNICEF initiative (Quebec, Guatemala, Botswana, Finland, & India) are based as well as the two countries (Sweden & Norway) which provided the funding for the initiative The UNESCO-UNICEF briefs do not call for a core HWB curricula to deliver these topics. Brief One (p9) states clearly that "the term FEHW does not seek to replace the terms used for existing health and well-being education programmes. Rather, the intention is to highlight common goals and objectives across a variety of primary school health and well-being education programmes, with the aim of promoting a more holistic and coordinated approach." This new UNESCO-UNICEF initiative is welcome but it does not meet its stated policy need to include HWB education as " a priority within the primary school curriculum" as stated in its Brief One. The initiative is a good collection of instructional programs and how they can be woven together but the initiative does not recommend that countries adopt a curriculum with a proper scope and sequence for learning defined HWB competencies which include knowledge, skills & attitudes. The Annex in Brief Two (pp 30-37) presents a list of illustrative learning objectives for the nine topics which could be used curricula, syllabi, teaching manuals, lessons plans or other educational materials. But it does not recommend that countries should develop a core HWB curriculum to address the topics. Further, the initiative wrongly suggests that complementary (co-curricular) and supplementary (extra-curricular) activities can act as replacement for classroom instruction focused on defined learning objectives in a curriculum. As well, it suggests the unproven strategy of inserting HWB content into other core subjects can also replace core instruction in a defined subject or discipline. (While primary school teachers can and do combine knowledge from various curricula into ad-hoc integrated lesson plans, doing this on a system basis would take extensive teacher planning time and coordination among the relevant education ministry curriculum specialists in order to create inter-disciplinary maps for each grade level that show how the objective of both health and the other subject are being achieved.) Finally, it is important to note that the initiative does not extend to secondary schools, making it even more difficult to define, describe and adapt age-appropriate student learning objectives for the adolescent years that should obviously be considered when planning primary school instruction. The next step for the UNESCO-UNICEF initiative could be to describe how these instructional programs can be delivered within the already existing curriculum structures used by countries and states. As shown in this complex diagram published by the FRESH Working Group, most countries use core stand-alone or combined subjects defined as Health and/or Life Skills, Home Economics and Physical Education. (These core HWB curricula are shown in red font within the diagram, which also depicts how learning about health, safety, personal, social and sustainable development (HSPSSD) can occur in other subjects, how that learning relates to the UN SDGs and how that teaching and learning can be influenced by a wide variety of conditions and factors. For more information about the UNESCO/UNICEF initiative go the FRESH Working Group and Research Agenda on Health & Life Skills education being developed by FRESH Partners The Center for Implementation has identified these resources to strengthen teamwork within organizations. TeamSTEPPS (Team Strategies & Tools to Enhance Performance & Patient Safety) is an evidence-based framework to optimize team performance across the healthcare delivery system.
While it is focused on healthcare contexts and patient outcomes, it can be useful for implementation support professionals aiming to have more concrete guidance on how to improve communication and teamwork. TeamSTEPPS is based on the premise of having clearly defined teams where team members make use of four skills: Communication – Process through which information can be exchanged among team members, Team Leadership – Ability to ensure that team actions are understood, plan changes are shared, and resources are accessible, Situation Monitoring – Continuous assessment of changes in situational elements, and their influence on planned actions and team functioning and Mutual Support – Anticipating team members’ needs and engaging in team support when needed. The TeamSTEPPS website, developed by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), offers a comprehensive set of resources that can be helpful for your team, including introductory guides, a self-paced curriculum, videos, and training opportunities.. Go to the TCI Toolbox The first global report on early childhood care and education offers insights, new findings and key recommendations to enhance ECCE worldwide.. Co-published by UNESCO and UNICEF, the new report delivers on a commitment made at the 2022 World Conference on ECCE, when 155 countries committed to ensuring that every child gets at least one year of free, compulsory pre-primary education and to work towards dedicating at least 10% of education budgets to this crucial life stage. The report advocates for universal ECCE that uses an integrated approach such as that described by UNESCO and OECD in 2002. Read the report.
The meeting was convened by the SDG4 High-Level Steering Committee (HLSC). This June 17 will open a series of 2024 global meetings which will support the advancement of Sustainable Development Goal 4 on quality education (SDG4), such as the High-Level Political Forum at the United Nations Headquarters in New York in July, the Summit of the Future in September and the Global Education Meeting in October. The meeting launched Phase Two of the Country Dashboard tracking country commitments from the Transforming Education Summit. This phase tracked many but not all of theose commitments. Themes reported included Greening Education and Education in Emergencies. Read more.
A new UNESCO, OECD, Commonwealth of Learning report analyzes for the first time the economic and societal cost of educational deficiencies. .UNESCO puts the cost to the global economy of school drop-out and education gaps at $10,000 billion a year by 2030, equivalent to more than the annual GDPs of France and Japan combined. Conversely, the report estimates that reducing the proportion of early school leavers or those without basic skills by just 10% would increase annual GDP growth by 1 to 2 percentage points. Social & emotional skills are a big part of the report. Read the full report.
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