Conference Agenda

The mental health of children and young people is increasingly highlighted in educational policy agendas. The Covid 19 pandemic has added a tone of urgency to the expression of concerns about mental health, and schools are increasingly positioned as possible sites of impact, support and intervention. As a result, school-based mental health interventions are increasingly common. Many of these are focused at the level of the individual and draw on western knowledge frameworks. Such programmes tend to ignore the social, political and historical contexts of mental health and wellbeing, including the role of colonisation and how forms of exclusion at the intersection of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, racism, and disability coalesce to frame schooling experiences over time. This paper draws on postcolonial theory to consider the tensions between individualistic and social/ political approaches to mental health and wellbeing and reflects on recent curriculum policy moves. It engages an inquiry into mental health education curriculum policy in Aotearoa New Zealand, exploring the basis of new curriculum articulations and what these might offer, reflect, promise, and obscure.

Educational approaches to wellbeing in contexts where children’s everyday lives face the adverse impacts of global changes, including climate change, deserve more in-depth consideration. As it stands, despite the high diversity of contextualized implementations of wellbeing education programs, these are conditioned by the existence of well-functioning school facilities (buildings and grounds). There is no doubt that the school represents a unique setting for the promotion of social and emotional wellbeing (Barry et al, 2017). Nevertheless, we must question any homogenous school-based wellbeing intervention that is not context-sensitive (McLellan et al, 2022). With that in mind, how can we continue to nurture children’ wellbeing when the school is no longer considered a viable or safe space? While scholars, policy makers and practitioners have been debating whether it is the school duty of the school to promote wellbeing (Primdahl et al, 2018), the dependance of prevailing student wellbeing model(s) on strong and stable school infrastructures has so far never been genuinely questioned, not even during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Climate-induced changes tend to impact children from the poorest communities more deeply (Zmirou-Navier, 2021). In its 2022 report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) noted that the adverse impacts of climate change “disproportionately affect marginalized groups, amplifying inequalities and undermining sustainable development across all regions.” For example, it is expected that by 2030 almost 125 million children in Africa will be subjected to water scarcity, malnutrition, and displacement because of climate change (Fambasayi & Addaney, 2021). Extreme weather events are themselves traumatic experiences, and losing a school magnifies the negative psychosocial consequences generated by the loss of other resources and sentimental possessions (Shultz, 2016). The number of affected schools is striking. As example, Kenya has recorded that in 2018 alone, 700 schools were impacted by disastrous climate-changed events and had to close as a consequence (Fambasayi & Addaney, 2021). In 2016, Hurricane Matthew damaged 300 schools and affected a total of 700 in Haiti, while 86 were used as shelters and thus disrupted their educational purpose (Shultz, 2016).

The intertwining of climate and social justice is clear beyond argument. Since the 1960s, social justice has been at the core of the climate change discourse, bringing into our awareness key themes such as global environmental inequality (Bourg, 2020). The current popularity in the Global North of school-based ecoliteracy programs, which aim at enhancing human-environment relationships, is a major outcome of this trend (McBride et al, 2013). However, the connection between knowledge on the impacts of environmental hazards on populations and knowledge pertaining to children’s wellbeing in the most affected regions has remained, up to now, underdeveloped. This paper draws from a social justice perspective to propose an alternative framework that sustainably supports the wellbeing of children in locations where school buildings are no longer available/accessible, appropriate for learning, or even considered safe spaces due to extreme weather events (e.g., heat waves, wildfires, etc.).

Sexuality is a central part of human identity, integrity, well-being, and satisfaction with life in general, in addition to being vital for human reproduction (Kågesten & van Reewijk, 2021; OECD 2020). Therefore, sexual health promotion across age groups and settings is crucial from an individual as well as a societal perspective. The most widespread and established definition of sexual health is developed by the World Health Organization (WHO 2006a), which defines it as a concept of physical, emotional, mental, and social well-being in relation to sexuality. Thus, according to this definition a holistic perspective on sexuality and sexual health promotion is crucial. Furthermore, an important element of sexual health promotion is sexual health literacy – a component of the broader concept of health literacy (Vongxay et al., 2019), which in practice means to take responsibility for one's own and one's family/ community health (Sørensen et al., 2012). More precisely it is a combination of skills in various dimensions of sexual health, which enables an understanding and application of sexual health information and communication (Dehghankar et al., 2022; Kågesten & van Reeuwijk, 2021). Focusing on health literacy as a health promotion action is a holistic, sustainable, and cost-effective strategy (Okan et al., 2020). Therefore, alongside the concept of sexual health defined by WHO (2006), sexual health literacy will be a central concept for the sexual health promotion perspective in this review study.

Sexual health programs and interventions in schools constitute a multidisciplinary and primary health promoting method. School is a crucial platform for students to learn about sexual health and develop a capacity to make informed decisions regarding their sexual health (WHO, 2015). It is furthermore one of the few arenas that reaches nearly all adolescents, regardless of socio-economical background. When healthy adolescent sexuality development and a positive understanding of the self in relation to others is promoted, it will not only be beneficial in this specific period in life but also regarding the future of the adolescents (Kågesten, et al., 2021). Numerous previous review studies have however measured the effects of sexual health interventions in schools from a risk-perspective, although it is not considered to be an optimal nor an effective health promotion approach (McCracken et al., 2016; Lameiras-Fernández et al., 2021). A risk-approach does not either cover the positive sexuality content that adolescents themselves wish to learn more about (Fowler, Schoen, Smith & Morain, 2022; OECD 2020). Furthermore, most of the existing reviews on sexual health interventions includes all international studies or studies exclusively conducted in North America or Australia (e.g., Wang, Lurie, Govindasamy, and Mathews 2018), although school systems, culture as well as political context differs a lot depending on continent as well as country. Previous studies have argued that for sexual health promotion in schools to be effective, various contextual socio-economical as well as political dimensions need to be taken into consideration (McCracken et al., 2016; Vongxay et al., 2019). To the authors’ knowledge, there are no previous systematic review studies evaluating sexual health-promotion interventions, with a focus on the positive sexuality, conducted in Europe. Therefore, this review aims to systematically gather and synthesize the current evidence on sexual health-promoting interventions in order to assess the effectiveness of sexual health-promoting programs conducted in schools in Europe.