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The purpose of this paper is to examine Finnish ninth grade pupils’ (15-16 years) perspectives on hot school lunches and consider the potential of these perspectives as a resource for food and health education.

Data include observations, essays, and visually elicitated focus group discussions from a larger qualitative case study. Data were collected during the term 2012-2013.

Pupils considered the lunch break as their free time and valued discussions with friends. The taste of school food was important for them. Pupils solved contradicting expectations connected to school lunches through constructing social hierarchies, making compromises, and conforming to peers’ or general opinions. Desire for social belonging and independence were important justifications for breaking food-related rules.

Due to the focus on one school, further research needs to address contextual variation in different schools and age groups, as well as the viewpoint of teachers.

To genuinely engage pupils, potential contradictions between adults’ and adolescents’ perspectives need attention. Understanding food-related social determinants and justifications for food practices from pupils’ perspective are valuable pedagogical assets for teachers. Pupils’ speech and activities that counteract formal aims can be seen also as possibilities for dialogue, rather than merely problems to be changed by adults.

The paper describes how pupils’ perspectives to school lunch practices are in tension with the educational aims of school lunches, thus contributing to developing adolescent-centered food and health education in secondary schools.

Whole-school approaches emphasising pupil participation are recognised as being conducive for building social capital, yet how participatory health educational processes relate to different types of social capital remains unclear. The purpose of this paper is to explore which mechanisms within a participatory health educational process influence social capital and collective actions in the school context, and to discuss children’s agency in such processes.

A multiple case study design, with the Danish “We Act – Together for Health” intervention, considered as an instrumental case regarding participatory health educational processes for children, principally since it applied the participatory Investigation–Vision–Action–Change (IVAC) methodology. The paper is based on a theory-driven, abductive research strategy. Qualitative methods, including focus group interviews with children, semi-structured interviews with teachers and school principals, and participant observation were used.

The study’s conceptual framework, which elucidates several mechanisms that interact with types of social capital and collective actions within the school setting, indicates that working with child participation through the IVAC methodology can influence types of social capital and collective actions. It also emphasises children’s limited agency in terms of affecting bridging and linking social capital, norms of reciprocity and collective actions without sufficient support mechanisms at the school and class levels.

The study provides a novel comprehensive conceptual framework identifying the specific mechanisms at different levels that influence social capital and collective actions.

There is increasing recognition of children's abilities to speak for themselves. School democracy, as demonstrated by genuine participation, has the potential to benefit both teachers and students; leading to better relationships and improved learning experiences. The aim of this study is to investigate whether participation in schools in Ireland is linked with perceived academic performance, liking school and positive health perceptions.

Data were collected via self‐completion questionnaires from a stratified random sample of 10,334 students aged 10‐17 years in Irish schools. The questions included encouragement to express their views in class, participation in the organisation of school events; taking part in making school rules; liking school, perceived academic performance, self‐rated health, life satisfaction and self‐reported happiness. Associations between school participation and other measures were expressed by odds ratios from logistic regression models, conducted separately for girls and boys.

More than 63 per cent of participating students reported that they were encouraged to express their views in class, 58 per cent that they were involved in organising school events and 22 per cent that they had been involved in making school rules. All forms of participation were lower among older students. Participation in school was significantly associated with liking school and higher perceived academic performance, better self‐rated health, higher life satisfaction and greater reported happiness.

These data are all cross‐sectional and relationships cannot imply causality.

These findings underscore the relevance of school participation for students in Ireland.

The paper illustrates that, in general, positive relationships between school participation and health and wellbeing are demonstrated among Irish children.

The paper seeks to report the impact of a partnership training intervention on trainee teachers' confidence to teach Personal, Social and Health Education.

This intervention required trainee teachers to work in 15 groups of four across subject disciplines. Each group was required to negotiate, plan and deliver their intended lesson on PSHE in a partnership school. The initiative was evaluated on a pre‐ and post‐test basis by getting each trainee to complete a PSHE Key Skills Confidence Scale that consisted of 45 items, 25 pertaining to working together and 20 to communication.

Results revealed a significant change in trainees' confidence in all of the key PSHE‐related skills. Trainee teachers reported increased confidence in “agreeing what else could have been done to improve working relationships and methods”, “using role play strategies”, “reaching agreement on whether or not the activity fulfilled its objectives”, “considering strategies that will empower pupils to make informed choices about their health”, “determining pupils' attitudes and views of health and healthy living”; “ensuring that pupils received information about the factors which affect health”, “identifying factors that influenced the learning outcome”, and “encouraging pupils to be assertive and resist unwanted peer pressure and other influences”.

It is recommended that all trainee teachers are assessed on their ability to deliver and evaluate PSHE lessons as part of the award of Qualified Teacher Status. Furthermore, it is essential that trainee teachers receive specific resistance/life skills training as part of their initial and continuing professional development.

In recent years the credo that small schools are superior to large schools has gained wide, and often uncritical support. The purpose of this paper is to indicate serious shortcomings in the case for small secondary schools as presented in the past several years in South Australia. Moreover, in the light of these shortcomings, the need for a reappraisal of the concept of school is emphasized, particularly in view of the fact that an unwarranted acceptance of the argument in favour of small secondary schools could exert a deleterious effect on secondary school provision.

The purpose of this paper is to assess the implementation of the Welsh Network of Healthy School Schemes (WNHSS) at national, local and school levels, using a systems approach drawing on the Ottawa Charter.

The approach takes the form of a single‐case study using data from a documentary analysis, interviews with Healthy Schools Co‐ordinators (n=23) and stakeholder (n∼93) discussion of interim findings at three regional workshops.

There was almost universal adherence to a national framework based on Ottawa Charter principles. Substantial progress had been made with advocacy and mediation, although the framework provided less specific guidance regarding enablement. All‐Wales training for co‐ordinators, the commitment of co‐ordinators to working across administrative and professional boundaries, and support from local education and health partnerships, were important determinants of healthy school schemes' growth and efficiency. Primary schools were more successful than secondary schools in embedding health‐related changes.

Although findings are largely based on indirect evidence, the use of a social‐ecological model of evaluation provided valuable insights into implementation processes at multiple levels. Findings suggest that strong national support benefits programme development and dissemination and should include effective monitoring of local performance. The national strategic environment was influential at all levels of programme implementation. Priorities for further research include application of the social‐ecological model and organisational theory to investigate indicators of sustainability and influences on inequalities in health in school health promotion programmes.

The review illustrates the importance of evaluating health promotion programmes at multiple levels using a systems approach.

Evaluation of teaching Is a key concern of educational administration. In Victoria, Australia, inspectors are required to carry out assessments of teaching performance hut no written guide or checklist is provided. This study seeks to identify by means of two instruments, a critical incident paper and an evaluation record designed to highlight Mitzel's Product, Process and Presage criteria, the criteria used by Victorian inspectors in evaluating teacher performance. It was found that inspectors stressed Process criteria when recommending promotion in teaching positions and Presage criteria when recommending selection for administrative positions. Little emphasis was placed on Product criteria. Inspectors' judgments of teachers were found to be based largely on their own individual “image” of good teachers. On the basis of this study it seems that a guide could be developed to assist inspectors in reaching agreement on basic criteria for promotion of teachers.

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 canonical narratives (Bruner, 2004) of contemporary research with children include participation, agency and voice. This inclusive language has saturated research literature throughout the development of the “new” social studies of childhood (James, Jenks, & Prout, 1998). Their presence was highlighted as illuminating greater understanding of the social realities of children’s lives but they mask and mute as much as they reveal. Heralded as the holy grail of emancipatory research with children, participatory methods have come to be recognized almost exclusively as the route for ethical practice and valid data. The absence of substantial, critical evaluation results in these concepts being little more than “cherished conceits” (Segal, 1999, p. 118). There has been a lack of thorough interrogation of what participation actually means and the data and social relations it produces. Participation implies collaboration and reciprocity but is counter-intuitively used to seek and promote the agentic child enshrined in neoliberalism. Children as social beings negotiate complex social relations (Richards, Clark, & Boggis, 2015) but this is often lost in research encounters which privilege the individual voice, informed by an under-interrogated definition of agency. Instead of following the neoliberal agenda we argue that recognizing the ways in which participatory methods, agency, and voice can and should promote reciprocal and relational social realities is vital to a better understanding of the worlds of children. We call not for their expulsion from research methods but for a re-evaluation of the assumptions that lie beneath and what is produced in their name.

The article reports results of a longitudinal survey, which assesses the importance of decision‐making attributes by potential higher education students. Conjoint analysis is applied to establish candidates’ utilities of identified key decision‐making attributes – course content, location and reputation – on two separate occasions over a 14 month period. The full profile approach is employed in order to capture all the alternative combinations present. The main contribution of this article is the assessment of changes in the weightings of the key attributes over the period. Findings indicate that in the early stages of the decision‐making process, prospective students view course content as the most significant factor, but that as the consumption process nears, location becomes increasingly important. Reputation is an exchangeable element throughout and is considered less important. Implications for the marketing of higher education courses are discussed.