(From the ISHN Member information service)  One of the major challenges in sustaining and integrating health and social programs within education systems is the tendency in government to create and maintain "silos" of programs, often delivered in isolation or even competition with each other. Most governments create committees to encourage coordination but they often fail, or they focus on only one problem at a time. The Manitoba Healthy Child Agency, a strategy established in law in 2007, is an exception to this rule. The slogan on Manitoba license plates tells the world about "Friendly Manitoba". More than just words, this slogan actually reflects a culture and customs in the province, one which was born in Canada's harshest winters and bred by generations of immigrants who had to rely on each other. So, perhaps, it is this culture of cooperation that enables Healthy Child Manitoba (HCM) to be as effective as an inter-ministry agency, coordinating several ministers and ministries, in a "whole of government" strategy.  Other factors could include their requirement to report results every five years, its research, innovation and knowledge development capacity, and its combination of programs (as opposed to framework documents) that are delivered hands-on and delegated ways. As well, the Healthy Child inter-ministry program has its own legislation, entitled the Healthy Child Manitoba Act, thereby giving its coordination work legal authority and requirements to report every five years on progress.     

The HCM web site describes its work as follows: " in 2000, the provincial government implemented the Healthy Child Manitoba (HCM) Strategy – a network of programs and supports for children, youth and families. This nationally recognized strategy was set in legislation under The Healthy Child Manitoba Act in 2007.Led by the Healthy Child Committee of Cabinet, Healthy Child Manitoba bridges departments and governments and, together with the community, works to improve the well-being of Manitoba's children and youth. HCM focuses on child-centred public policy through the integration of financial and community-based family supports.In addition to these cross-sectoral government structures, The HCM Act also continues the work of cross-sectoral community structures, including Parent-Child Coalitions and the Provincial Healthy Child Advisory Committee (PHCAC). HCM researches best practices and models and adapts these to Manitoba's unique situation. It strengthens provincial policies and programs for healthy child and adolescent development, from the prenatal period to adulthood. HCM then evaluates programs and services to find the most effective ways to achieve the best possible outcomes for Manitoba children, families, and communities."

(An item from the ISHN Member information service)  An article in Issue #4, 2013 of Educational Administration Quarterly describes the new and different kinds of leadership skills needed by school principals who are assigned to schools in disadvantaged or tribal communities. The article "examined how the federal Promise Neighborhoods program shapes leadership networks and objectives in diverse tribal and urban settings. The program calls for diverse stakeholders to provide families with resources such as parenting workshops, childcare, preschool, health clinics, and other social services that affect learning and development. We focused particularly upon how Promise Neighborhoods planning and development creates new “frontiers of educational leadership." The "Promise Neighborhoods planning grant applications in the USA —21 that were funded and 21 from tribal settings—as well as interview data and program and community-specific archival data were analyzed to learn about applicants’ purposes and compositions of partners. These data were analyzed with insights from Burt’s notion of structural holes, which suggests that leadership in “social frontier” spaces is often dependent upon negotiation, entrepreneurship, and relationship brokering." The authors suggest that " As Promise Neighborhoods and other place-based initiatives are developed, diverse networks of leaders will be called to bridge organizational boundaries, cultural differences, socioeconomic differences, and physical distances to develop coherent plans of action for collective “Neighborhoods.”  Read more>>

(An item from the ISHN Member information service) An article in Issue #4, 2013 of Journal of Health Organization & Management discusses how the unique professional identities and norms of physicians can hinder organizational improvements and developments. Since school health promotion programs usually and ultimately report to a physician who is the senior manager, this article should be of importance when seeking to modify health system approaches to schools. The authors found that "If managers want physicians to engage in improvements, they must learn to understand and appreciate physician identity. This might challenge managers' identity. The paper shows how managers – primarily in a Swedish context – could act to facilitate physician engagement. This in turn might challenge physician identity. Read more>>

(An item from the ISHN Member information service) The school health movement has focused on transforming schools through "whole school" strategies. As proponents, we would learn much from reading Issue #2, 2013 of Improving Schools, where the concept of "schoolwide pedagogies" is discussed in a special issue. There are several articles but this quote from the concluding article is quite revealing. "The term schoolwide pedagogy was once rarely heard and yet has now become a part of most discussions around school improvement. But what does it really mean and why is the presence of a schoolwide pedagogical framework important? Some would say that in their school the adoption of an authoritative approach such as Habits of Mind, Bloom’s Taxonomies or the Productive Pedagogies is a schoolwide pedagogical framework. To some extent they are, but what is often lacking is the intellectual and social capacity that is built through collective professional sharing and articulation of strongly held beliefs about contextually relevant teaching and learning practices. Without this sense of ownership, teacher adoption ends up being sporadic at best with some teachers paying only lip service to imposed quality frameworks". If this is the case for matters at the heart of the school (ie how to teach), then what can we expect for matters such as health, which are often seen as secondary? (unless we truly understand and commit to working within schools in a sustained manner) Read more>>

(An item taken from the daily/weekly/monthly ISHN Member information service) An article in Issue #3, 2012 of Educational Administration Quarterly provides advice that many of us should take to heart before we re-invent yet another model or framework on school health promotion. Using meta-analytic review techniques, this study synthesized the results of 79 unpublished studies about the nature of transformational school leadership (TSL) and its impact on the school organization, teachers, and students. This corpus of research associates TSL with 11 specific leadership practices. These practices, as a whole, have moderate positive effects on a wide range of consequential school conditions. They also have moderately strong and positive effects on individual teachers’ internal states, followed by their influence on teacher behaviors and collective teachers’ internal states. TSL has small but significant positive effects on student achievement. Now here is the kicker...The authors also state that: "Among the conclusions arising from the study is that several of the most widely advocated models of effective educational leadership actually include many of the same practices. Conclusions: More attention by researchers, practitioners, and researchers needs to be devoted to the impact of specific leadership practices and less to leadership models"  Read More..