A paper released by the Brookings Institute, USA, adds more support for the policy direction of providing integrated student services to drive educational outcomes. "Effective approaches to the problems of struggling neighborhoods—from health to school success and poverty—require the focused use of integrated strategies. Consistent with this, community schools and many charter schools now function as hubs, helping to deliver a range of services beyond education in order to prepare their students to learn and to assist families. These include social services, “two-generation” support, and population health services. There is debate over the potential of schools as hubs and the impact on school achievement. For success, we need to explore how schools can best “integrate backwards.” That requires us consider how schools can function in an interdependent manner with providers of, say, mental health care or social services yet maintain the control needed to customize services to a student’s needs and achieve academic objectives. Despite their considerable potential, schools face many challenges in operating as hubs. These include (1) Sharing student information with other services sectors is often difficult because of privacy rules and interoperability problems. (2) The wider community impact of hub-based services is rarely measured fully or reflected in city or county budgetsSchool leaders need specialized training to coordinate services efficiently. (4) Intermediaries can help schools coordinate services, but turning to outside organizations can alter the focus of a school and the locus of control." Read more>> (An item from the ISHN Member information service)
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There are several initiatives underway around the world that are developing broader, more holistic sets of Indicators of the school's role in promoting academic achievement by also providing in-school conditions, adapted instruction and supports, as well as referrals to other services to support learning and overcome barriers to learning. A recent paper from the UCLA School Mental Health Project is one example of this trend. The rationale is presented succinctly. "School accountability is a policy tool with extraordinary power to reshape schools – for good and for bad. Systems are driven by accountability measures. This is particularly so under “reform” conditions. As everyone involved in school reform knows, the only measure that really counts is achievement test scores. These tests drive school accountability, and what such tests measure has become the be-all and end-all of what is attended to by many decision makers. This produces a growing disconnect between the realities of what it takes to improve academic performance and the direction in which many policy makers and school reformers are leading the public . "As illustrated (in the UCLA framework), there is no intent to deflect from the laser-like focus on meeting high academic standards. Debate will continue about how best to measure academic outcomes, but clearly schools must demonstrate they effectively teach academics. At the same time, policy must acknowledge that schools also are expected to pursue high standards in promoting positive social and personal functioning, including enhancing civility, teaching safe and healthy behavior, and some form of “character education.” Read more>> (An item from the ISHN Member information service)
A report on the evidence base supporting the use of integrated student supports (ISS) or services, published by Child Trends in the USA, is a timely find for us this week, as ISHN, ASCD and Education International move into the next phase in our global dialogue on better integration of health and social programs in education systems. (Integrated services for students, especially vulnerable students is one way to secure better integration). The report estimates that "ISS programs serve more than 1.5 million students in nearly 3,000 elementary and high schools across the USA. "while individual programs vary somewhat in the ways they provide integrated student supports, all ISS providers employ common components (needs assessment, integration within schools, community partnerships, coordinated supports, and data tracking); all provide wrap-around supports to improve students’ academic achievement and educational attainment; and all embrace the premise that academic outcomes are a result of both academic and non-academic factors". The Child Trend review of the research found that (1) There is emerging evidence that ISS can contribute to student academic progress as measured by decreases in grade retention and dropout, and increases in attendance, math achievement, reading and ELA achievement, and overall GPA. (2) ISS, as a student-centered approach, is firmly grounded in the research on child and youth development. (3) ISS programs are also aligned with empirical research on the varied factors that promote educational success. (4) Preliminary studies find a positive return on investment in ISS. Read more>> (An item from the ISHN Member information service)
Since about 2005, our attention in school health and social development has included a focus on the country, community and neighbourhood contexts as a key factor in selecting the issues to be addressed, the programs to be used and the capacities to be strengthened. ISHN has worked with others to develop frameworks for indigenous communities, disadvantaged communities in high resource countries and more recently, in low resource countries. But those efforts are ahead of the good research required to guide practice. So we were pleased to note the article in the September 2015 Issue of Implementation Science describing a project to Identify the domains of context important to implementation science. "This research program will result in a framework that identifies the domains of context and their features that can facilitate or hinder: (1) healthcare professionals’ use of evidence in clinical practice and (2) the effectiveness of implementation interventions. The framework will increase the conceptual clarity of the term “context” for advancing implementation science, improving healthcare professionals’ use of evidence in clinical practice, and providing greater understanding of what interventions are likely to be effective in which contexts." Read more>> (An item from the ISHN Member information service)
As is often the case each week in our review of the 300+ journals we monitor, we have identified several systematic reviews and meta-analyses. These include a look at the Cochrane, Health Technology Assessment web sites as well as those that are published in the journals. This week's titles include; Programs For Preventing Sexually-Transmitted Infections, School-based Interventions to Control Childhood Obesity, School-based marijuana and alcohol prevention programs, Injury prevention in child & adolescent sport, Programs to strengthen parent-adolescent communication about reproductive health, active video games on health outcomes among children and adolescents, Practice- and Community-Based Interventions to Increase HPV Vaccine Coverage, effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of parenting interventions for children with severe attachment problems, Fluoridated milk in low resource countries for preventing dental caries and Hand washing promotion for preventing diarrhea. Read more>> (An item from the ISHN Member information service)
Several articles in Issue #5, 2015 of Administration and Policy in Mental Health and Mental Health Services Research provide insights and methods for significantly changing the research in school health promotion and social development. Most studies, often replicated again and again, measure the linear impact of a selected intervention (instructional program, policy or service) delivered at the school level only on a behaviour or problem. Sometimes, combinations of interventions delivered at the school level, usually aimed at one or two behaviours or combination of problems, are evaluated for a short period of time. Rarely, we see attempts to group these singular or limited intervention studies into a health promoting schools model and assess whether the HPS model works (Again, the assessments almost never extend beyond the school to include clinics or other agencies or upwards into the health, education and other systems. Implementation research, a new type of work in health promotion and social development, has also been limited to this narrow, singular and front-line scope. This is because of the costs and complexity of multi-level research in large systems. As noted in the introduction to this set of articles in this journal "Implementing evidence-based and innovative practices, treatments, and services in large systems is highly complex, and has not, until recently, been guided by empirical or theoretical knowledge. Mixed method designs and approaches have been proposed to promote a more complete and efficient way of understanding the full range of factors that influence the dissemination and implementation of evidence-based innovations in large systems.This special issue provides both an overview of mixed methods designs and approaches, as well as applications and integration of sophisticated sampling, statistical methods and models (borrowed from various fields such as anthropology, statistics, engineering and computer science) to increase the range of solutions for handling the unique challenges of design, sampling, measurement, and analysis common in implementation research. In the six papers in this special issue, we describe conceptual issues and specific strategies for sampling, designing, and analyzing complex data using mixed methods. The papers provide both theoretically-informed frameworks, but also practical and grounded strategies that can be used to answer questions related to scaling-up new practices or services in large systems." Read more>> (An item from the ISHN Member information service)
Since ISHN is active in the global school health level, I have been following the documents and debates that have occurred about the role of education in the new 2030 Sustainable Development Goals. I am usually pretty good at this type of thing but by the time the various documents emerged from the peculiar dance of the UN, I was lost. It turns out I may not be alone. Several articles in Volume 52, 2015 of Network for International Policies and Cooperation in Education and Training reflect on the World Education Forum (WEF) held in August 2015 in Incheon, South Korea. There were three documents in play; a "targets" document describing outputs and indicators; a "'framework for action (FFA) which is essentially a plan and a "declaration" for the WEF Conference to consider. At the end of the WEF, only one of these documents came to the floor for ratification by delegates. In the very last session, delegates were asked if they had any comments on the FFA (no one dared to do so) and the "targets", which have been dealt with in as committee, was folded into the FFA document. In other words, easy consensus and no haggling over targets. If you read through the articles in the special issue of this journal, you can get even more confused but it appears that UNESCO was guiding the process so that these education sector discussions would not get out of step with a parallel set of UN meetings discussing all of the global goals, including education. If you read the articles in this issue, you will also learn that the language of the Incheon Declaration is stronger and more coherent than the "targets" document but it may be, once again in education, come to be that "what is measurable gets measured" and "what is measured ends up being what matters". Read more>> (An item from the ISHN Member information service)
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