HEALTH POLICY INTERVENTION IN SCHOOLS PROMOTE PHYSICAL ACTIVITIES AMONG THE PUPILS

Summary in the original language of the document

Today, more and more children are overweight or obese than ever before. Schools can play a prominent role in easing the situation. Schools have a great potential through the curriculum, health promoting programming and transportation to preventing children from becoming obese and overweight. However schools are complex social systems that does not necessarily by themselves adapt to this new health promoting role and thus committed management support is needed. Since schools are complex organizational structures convenient organizational structure are needed to formalize the praxis that stakeholders at schools should perform. Policies has become the preferred organizational instrument that management can use to frame the health promoting intentions. However since schools are expected to perform more and more educational obligations, policies seem to emerge in many sub domains of the schools setting. For instance schools are expected to have food and nutrition policy (FNP), physical activity policy (PAP) and a health policy. However instead of seeing these policies as separate entities this paper speculate that there is a possible interrelatedness between the policies. In other words could it be that it is not so much the specific content of the policy as it is the policy process or the awareness raising related do it that produce healthier behaviour.