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
- Skills for health and well-being
- Social relations
- Understanding gender
- Violence prevention and staying safe
- Values, rights and culture
- The human body and development
- Sexual and reproductive health and development
- Mental health and psycho-social well-being
- Nutrition and physical activity
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
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