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The editorial aims to provide a brief overview of the individual contributions to the special issue, and a commentary positioning the contributions within research relating to the health‐promoting schools initiative in Europe.

The members of the Schools for Health in Europe Research Group were invited to submit their work addressing processes and outcomes in school health promotion to this special issue of Health Education. Additionally, an open call for papers was published on the Health Education web site. Following the traditional double blind peer review process, nine submissions were accepted for publication. Five of these are selected to be published in this issue and the rest will be published in a future issue of the journal.

The five articles in this issue take a comprehensive approach to health promotion in schools and reflect on the related processes and outcomes. Although diverse in focus and research methodology, the five contributions all emphasise that the question about the outcomes of the health‐promoting schools cannot, and should not be limited to narrowly defined health outcomes achieved through single health‐promotion interventions. Directly or indirectly the articles reiterate the idea that health promotion in schools needs to be linked with the core task of the school – education, and to the values inherent to education, such as inclusion, democracy, participation and influence, critical literacy and action competence in relation to health.

This special issue endorses the idea that health promotion in schools would do well to reconnect with the traditions of educational theory and to develop innovative forms of educational practices and interventions in the face of complex societal challenges concerning health and health promotion. It can be beneficial for stakeholders who work towards school based health promotion, assisting them in bridging the gap between health and education sector.

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the role of a school health promotion (SHP) advisor in the implementation of the six steps of the Dutch “Schoolbeat” approach, aimed at establishing health promotion policies and activities in secondary schools.

In total, 80 school board members, and 18 prevention coordinators of 18 schools in the Southern Limburg region in The Netherlands completed a written questionnaire on the implementation of the six steps of the Schoolbeat approach, and on their satisfaction with the practical assistance offered by the SHP advisor in implementing the steps, as well as the advisor's organizational competencies.

Only one school implemented the Schoolbeat approach completely, and as intended. Schools were generally satisfied with the practical assistance in the process of implementing the Schoolbeat steps and with the organizational competencies of the SHP advisor. Schools which had partly implemented the Schoolbeat steps were more satisfied with the SHP advisor's practical assistance than schools who had not done so at all.

This study showed that the SHP advisor could make a positive contribution to health promotion in schools. Since this role demands new skills, the competencies of health promotion professionals must be further developed.

Structural school health promotion programs and policies are becoming increasingly important in many countries, and not enough is known about the role of health promotion agencies in structuring school health promotion. This paper describes the positive impact of the SHP advisor.

Health and education are inextricably linked. Health promotion sits somewhat uncomfortably within schools, often remaining a marginal aspect of teachers’ work. The purpose of this paper is to examine the compatibility of an HP-initiative with teacher professional identity.

A qualitative research design was adopted consisting of semi-structured interviews. In total, 49 teachers in two school districts in the Auvergne region in central France were interviewed in depth post having completed three years’ involvement in a health promoting schools initiative called “Learning to Live Better Together” (“Apprendre a Mieux Vivre Ensemble”).

Teachers in the study had a broad conceptualisation of their role in health promotion. In keeping with international trends, there was more success at classroom than at whole school level. While generally teachers can be reluctant to engage with health promotion, the teachers in this study identified having little difficulty in understanding their professional identity as health promoters and identified strong compatibility with the HP-initiative.

Teachers generally viewed professional development in health promotion in a positive light when its underlying values were commensurate with their own and when the context was seen as compatible with the school mission. The promotion of health in schools needs to be sensitive to professional identity and be tailored specifically to blend more successfully with current teacher identity and practice.

The promotion of health in schools needs to be sensitive to professional identity and be tailored specifically to blend more successfully with current teacher identity and practice.

School principals are presumed to be pillars of school health promotion implementation. Their understanding of their role could enhance school health promotion. This study aims to investigate how principals understood their role in school health promotion.

In this study, semi-structured interviews were conducted with six school principals who participated and completed the first cycle of the Continuous Professional Teacher Development programme that was offered by the South African Council of Educators. Snowball sampling was used to sample participants.

The findings of this study showed that principals did not differentiate between concepts of health-promoting schools and school health promotion, the meaning was the same for them. They focused on any health improvement within the schools, regardless of its conceptual nature. The second finding pertains to the role of the principal as a manager, while the third was on expedition of collaborations and partnerships.

This research was limited to school principals who completed the Continuous Professional Teacher Development programme. It, therefore, does not include perceptions of other principals.

The study findings suggest that despite inability of schools in poor communities to implement effective school health programmes, the principals of the sampled schools were aware of their roles. This is positive, as the efforts to enhance health promotion initiatives would focus on developing and empowering principals to improve their performance.

This study explores to what extent health promotion policy in practice and leadership engagement is reflected in school actors' experiences of health dialogues (HDs) and their ideas about promoting health and learning in schools.

The 93 participants consisted of 44 school nurses, 37 students in grades 4, 7 or the first year of high school and 12 teachers, who shared their experiences with HDs by writing open letters.

The qualitative content analysis resulted in four themes: Putting health on the agenda, Finding a common goal, Walking side by side and Pointing out a healthy direction. The participants' expectations of school health promotion leadership are revealed in suggestions on how the HDs can fulfill both the educational assignment and promote student health.

Based on the findings, we argue that for successful school health promotion leaders need to acknowledge the field of tension where leadership has to take place, anchor health promotion policy and administer “a Sandwich approach” – a top-down and bottom-up leadership simultaneously that facilitates school-based health promotion.

When different school actors (school nurses, teachers and students) are given a voice, a collective picture of HDs can emerge and help develop health promotion practices.

Highlights the challenge of evaluating the healthy or health‐promoting school and describes the development of an instrument for profiling and monitoring the development of such institutions. The adaptability and scope of the instrument is discussed at length and this includes use of the instrument to undertake valuations of existing health‐promotion assets within schools and evaluation of the health‐promoting school. Examples of how the instrument has been used, both nationally and internationally, are provided. A detailed description of the methodology introduces the notion of profiling the health‐promoting/healthy school, and health‐promoting assets in schools, using a multiple‐axes radial profile graph. Discusses the challenges of creating an evaluation instrument that recognises the practical difficulties of undertaking evaluation in schools, the complex nature of the health‐promoting school, and the underlying principles of evaluating health promotion.

Reports on a study that examined the issues related to health promotion in the 30 Finnish comprehensive schools participating in the European Network of Health Promoting Schools (ENHPS). The data were collected from school representatives in January 1998, at a national ENHPS event, using a questionnaire developed for the study. The response rate was 100 per cent. The results show that the school representatives considered that a general infrastructure for health promotion existed in schools, and that the clarification of the mission of health promotion in schools was well developed. Networking within the communities that surrounded the schools was reported as being uncommon.

This paper seeks to discuss the rationale of the newly reformed health education curriculum in Cyprus, which aspires to enable not only teachers, but also all the school personnel, to work from the perspective of health promotion. It is a curriculum which moves from the traditional approach of health education focusing on individual lifestyle/behaviour modification into approaches that recognise and tackle the determinants of health.

The paper critically discusses the structure and the content of the learning objectives of this curriculum that encourages teachers to work in a health promoting way.

The central goal of this curriculum is to enable students and schools to act as health agents, addressing the structural determinants of health and promoting environmental changes. The optimum level for all topics of the curriculum is achieved through learning objectives, which concern three interconnected levels. These are: “investigating determinants of health”, “practising action competency skills for health” and “achieving changes in favour of health”. All levels are means as well as end products in terms of the curriculum objectives.

The outcome of the development of the health education curriculum acts as a guide for school interventions, through a methodological framework, which encourages participants to identify and promote environmental changes that facilitate healthy choices. This is of significance to those working in the field of health promotion and who seek to establish a new language of health promotion that goes beyond the pervasive discourse of individual lifestyles.

The implementation of the particular health education curriculum will promote not only health in the school community but also in the local community. This is because a key principle which underlies the curriculum is the involvement of the students, school staff, family and community in everyday health promotion practice. It also promotes the development of partnerships among them.

This is an innovative curriculum for Cyprus, based on health promotion and health education principles, but at the same time taking in account the local socio‐cultural and political perspective. This curriculum may be applicable to other European countries.

Schools are an important setting for a wide variety of activities to promote health. The purpose of this paper is to map the different types of health promotion programmes and activities in schools, to estimate the amount of published evaluations of health promotion within UK schools, and to identify any provisional “candidate programme theories” to inform a planned theory-driven systematic review.

Review of reviews: in total, 67 published systematic reviews of health promotion in schools were identified, from which a sub-sample of 28 systematic reviews (on 14 health topics) were retrieved for more detailed reading.

Key dimensions of programme design and delivery fell mainly under the following categories: the problem and age-group of children targeted, who delivers the programme and how, and the scale and theoretical underpinning of the programme. Candidate programme theories spanned both effectiveness factors and aspects of programme implementation.

Few detailed “candidate theories” emerged for explaining how and why health promotion can more successfully implemented in different schools.

There are five or more systematic reviews of studies of health promotion programmes in schools which target: smoking prevention; physical activity; sexual health; emotional and behavioural health and well-being; mental health; substance abuse; obesity/overweight. This suggests probable duplication of health problem-specific systematic reviews.

The findings highlight the considerable diversity of health promotion in schools, and specifies key dimensions of this diversity. They underline the need to understand better how, why, and in what circumstances health promotion can be successfully implemented in different schools and education systems.

Schools are recognised as key settings for health promotion. This has resulted in resources being allocated specifically for the development of Health Promoting Schools. If the existing level of resourcing is to continue, mechanisms for monitoring the effectiveness of Health Promoting Schools need to be designed that are appropriate for the concept. Currently, there is an emphasis on evidence‐based practice, but the difficulty lies in determining what is acceptable as evidence in the context of Health Promoting Schools, and what are the most appropriate methods for collecting this evidence. The disease‐prevention approach, with its emphasis on controlled trials and discrete outcomes is not appropriate. New models must be developed that reflect the multi‐variant and dynamic nature of the processes involved. Outlines principles that could guide this work and includes consideration of the some key health‐promotion principles, including equity, consultation, collaboration, ownership and sustainability, linking these with some newer concepts, such as capacity building and social capital, which are proving useful in the development, monitoring and evaluation of Health Promoting Schools.