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Schools & Child Care

School Health and Well-being Information for administrators or principals

Healthy students are better prepared for learning.

Working together to address school's unique strengths and needs through a collaborative, planned, and integrated approach can help school communities become a healthy place for all.

Creating Your Action Plan
New: The Canadian School Health Standards (2021) can be used to help spark conversations and bring your school community together to elevate well-being. Use this resource as a checklist to chart your healthy school journey, or in a non-linear fashion as you need it.

We also recommend using the Ontario Foundations for a Healthy School (a companion resource to the K-12 school effectiveness framework) to address a range of health topic(s) and apply a comprehensive approach, through strategies in each of the following key areas:

  • Curriculum, teaching and learning
  • School and classroom leadership
  • Student engagement
  • Healthy physical and social environments
  • Home, school and community partnerships
Schools offer a wide range of opportunities for students to learn, practice and promote positive and healthy behaviours. The creation of Healthy School environments is heavily influenced by school and classroom leadership.

How to Implement The Healthy School Process /Approach

Whether you are new to the Healthy Schools process or looking to enhance what you have already started, our team of public health professionals is available to support you. We can help you to:

  • Raise awareness with your school community about the Healthy Schools process/approach
  • Invite your School Health nurse to present at a staff meeting, school council, etc.
  • Recruit one or two school staff to be your Healthy Schools champion.
  • Engage school staff, families, students and community partners as change-makers.
  • Having a diverse team helps ensure the strengths and needs of the whole school community are considered, and that key people are included to plan how these needs will be addressed and oversee the implementation of initiatives.
  • Assess the strengths and needs of your own school community to help inform the work of the team.
  • Review available health data and/or evidence to help inform priority setting.
  • Use a strengths-based approach to build on healthy strategies/initiatives already in place and learn from what is already working.
  • Communicate priority topics and future plans back to your broader school community.
  • Work with your team to formulate a customized, comprehensive action plan that is connected with your broader School Action/Improvement Plan.
  • Choose a range of activities to address priority issues using the Foundations for a Healthy School.
  • Incorporate sample ideas for Getting Started with Your Action Plan, Health Unit Initiatives, and/or choose from our sample newsletter Inserts.
  • Look for funding opportunities to help fund your planned initiatives; we can help with your application.
  • Promote activities to school community.
  • Implement activities from the action plan; Monitor activities, revise, and update as needed
  • Review and evaluate activities; keep a record of your progress and/or outcomes.
  • Celebrate successes along the way and/or at the end of each school year.
  • Plan for next year. Are there any areas for improvement or changes to consider? Each school year provides an opportunity to continue the work being done and/or for a fresh start!

For more information contact [email protected]
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