De facultad pasiva a facultad activa

The HPS concept is one that people support in principle. It would be a brave person or organisation that would argue against schools encouraging a school community working to provide students with an environment that provides opportunity to experience health promoting schooling. However, this does not automatically lead to a shared definition and understandings about the HPS. The range of players in any HPS will influence the local settlement about what it is to be a HPS ⎯ how it exists in reality; what is measured or evaluated to ‘prove’ that the school is in fact health promoting; when the school is said to have arrived and is health promoting, and who decides any or all of this. Thus the many of the dilemmas arise out of both the theorising and the practice of a HPS.

Given the long tradition of health education in schools, there is still considerable work to be done to assist educators and school communities to see the difference between theorising and practice. In struggling to provide schooling that will provide young people with some future security through further education and induction to

work with financial reward, parents, school administrators and the students themselves can be hard-pressed to see the benefits of a school with a central focus and priority on health. The benefits of a HPS may not be tangible enough although. results from the VicHealth HPS Project (1998) appear to be supporting anecdotal evidence that favours primary schools as more likely sites than secondary schools.

It has been suggested that ‘the HPS concept is so malleable that it can “fit” almost any school situation [in any culture]’ (Colquhoun, 1997a p.17). This has been echoed by Rowling (1996) in her comment on the strengths of the HPS model being applied to a range of countries and cultures: instead of ‘imposing a rigid project on countries, it provides a structure for them to organise their activities based on their particular need’ (p.525). It has been described as an umbrella term that can encompass almost any form of current practice, and because it also complements ‘New Right’ education discourse, the HPS is at considerable risk of losing its critical edge and it is therefore one possible reason why it is unlikely to deliver ‘emancipatory health education’ (Colquhoun 1989).

The Network for Healthy School Communities suggested descriptors of a HPS that are related to collaboration, school community ethos and practices, and action for communal benefit that was also the focus of its successor the Australian Health Promoting Schools Association (see Appendix A). A decade or more on, the

framework provided by the NH&MRC (1996) reflects a substantial shift in rhetoric to reflect the impact of the New Right ideology. Collection of data should be for the benefit of health and education, to be overseen by a national body, which develops ‘national indicators and monitors systems across a range of public health activity,’ (p.34). School health activity indicators are presented and justified on the basis of need for monitoring and accountability.

Much of the increasing wealth of materials about the HPS has been about health promoting schools is largely about the how-to deliver the externally set curriculum

resources rather than about the ‘why’ for social justice (Colquhoun 1997a). The main thrust of the materials is to provide key indicators, criteria for good practice, and checklists (Colquhoun 1997b), and the Western Pacific Region of the WHO has provided guidelines that support an award scheme (WHO 1995). The use of managerial terminology is endemic. Appropriate courses of action are called strategies. These strategies arise out of needs assessments and are evaluated on the basis of measurable objectives or key indicators (usually behavioural). There is a shift to a ‘team approach that is run on a participatory, decision-making model and is ‘literally ‘managing’ the success of the hegemony of a market-based political economy’ (Gracie 1991, p.339).

However, thought needs to be given to whose agendas and needs are being

proliferated in such a management style, and to the use of indicators and transitory rewards. Gracie (1991) builds on this idea in her assertion that

[I]t is ironic that a discourse [health promotion] articulating a concern to promote health in the name of freedom and ‘wholeness’ functions to alienate people from their capacity to engage in protest, and effectively operates to subject them further to the political and economic order’ (p. 334).

Therefore, some questions need to be asked about the direction and purpose of the health promoting school in Australia. For example, one question may be what is the

true measure of a health promoting school and is it the plaque that hangs in the reception area for visitors and prospective parents to see?

Williams et al. (1997) contend that there is some confusion about what the terms associated with a HPS actually mean. There is confusion about what a HPS aims to do and there is concern about the provision of simplistic, ‘tick-the-box’ checklists that can be used to justify what the school already does. The focus on the microscopic of ‘what’ is a HPS has been undertaken at the expense of the ‘essence’ or underlying principles originally intended by the larger HPS philosophy. It is therefore important, argue Williams et al., that schools, their community members and representatives are

actively involved in the formulation, enacting, evaluation and reporting of policy. The very community being affected also must have the opportunity to review and change policy as its local needs require.

Clearly, then, there is already a significant move towards the interpretation of health promoting schools as within the managerial terms of the New Right rather than for emancipatory health education. This is not necessarily surprising, given the current political and economic climate and the pressures being brought to bear in a plethora of areas, including schools, to enact the New Right’s triumvirate of effectiveness, evaluation and accountability. It appears that there is a significant challenge for those interested in and committed to health promotion and health promoting schools to remain focused on an intent that is emancipatory.

Kelly and Charlton (1995) contend that the most powerful critiques of health promotion have come from diametrically opposed viewpoints. They argue that there is no paradox in this because each movement ⎯ free market liberalism and Marxist- orientated attacks ⎯ is steeped in both the philosophy of utilitarianism and the classical economics of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. For them, the central problem for HP is that it ‘has become a political movement without resolving the key philosophical problems at the heart of both rightward and leftward thinking, namely the reconciliation of free will and determinism in explaining human behaviour’ (p.84).

Within health promotion, free will is held up as a guiding principle, ‘embedded in notions of empowerment and facilitation while at the same time defining the social structure as acting on people in a deterministic way (p.89). However, a significant hurdle in exploring and reflecting on HP practice in schools and other settings is that ‘[h]ealth promotion in its present form is riddled with contradictions in theory and practice (Nutbeam 1992). This state of affairs is exacerbated by the moralising zeal characteristic of the field that serves only to impair reflection. As a result there has

been ‘a failure to confront critique’ (Kelly & Charlton 1995, p.90).

It would seem, then, that there are still challenges for HPS. It appears that one of its biggest challenges lies in its ability to generate legitimacy outside the health arena, while also addressing what Ritchie and Rowling (1997) contend is ‘good’ health promotion practice for the 1990s. Kickbusch’s (1989) and Baum’s (1992) reviews of health promotion argue that ‘good’ practice is guided by a set of principles, and that these principles are:

• contextual ⎯ with the context being unable to be divorced from the HP action;

• participatory ⎯ involving the perceptions of communities in the way they construct their health concerns and seek solutions to address these concerns, especially inviting participation from those whose voices are less often heard; • multi-strategic ⎯ focusing on the interplay of a variety of coexisting means to

influence behaviour;

• dynamic ⎯ viewing the process as ever-changing rather than static, and cyclical rather than linear (Baum 1992, p.8).

How can HPS enact these principles in ways that have both health and educational meaning? To this end, Jensen (1997) points out the importance of the pedagogical in developing school communities that can deliver health promoting and empowering approaches. He argues that this is inclusive of not only what occurs in the classroom between the teacher and students but also between teachers as colleagues, pre and in- service professional development and that this is done with support from the wider school community, including the administration, parents and health agencies.

The HPS model is being used to meet an agenda that is outside the original intent of schools as settings for health promotion. The impact and growth of New Right principles in social democratic intentions such as the HPS model is a demonstration of the way in which the New Right has been able to generate what Apple (2003) calls

conservative modernization which is discussed below.