By She Yu, Zhang Jiahui & Ji Ying, Research Team on “Improving China’s Health Education System”, Social Development Research Department, DRC

Research Report, Special Issue, No.67, 2019 (Total 1695) 2019-9-18

Abstract: The health education at schools is an important component of the general health education and one’s healthy habits cultivated from childhood will lay a sound foundation for one’s lifelong health. It is an effective way to carry out health education among the pupils and students at school, which will influence their family, the society and the whole public. Governments of all levels in China have always attached great importance to health education at schools, established the fundamental organizational structure for school health education and successively issued a series of policies and requirements concerning the focal points, personnel, funding input and assessment of school health education, and actively carried out school health education activities. Exploratory projects are ongoing in some regions (schools) and have achieved good results. At present, the problems and challenges China’s school health education is faced with mainly include the unsound policy system, lack of effective coordination mechanism among different government departments, lack of motivation and capacity in carrying out school health education and irrational school health education curriculum and shortage of teaching resources and materials. In view of this, the following policy options are suggested. First, further efforts are needed to flesh out the policy and regulation system for school health education, optimize the curriculum, adopt more targeted approaches and strengthen the training of teachers and related personnel. What’s more, an effective assessment and incentive mechanism needs to be established and the collaboration among different departments or agencies involved in school health education needs to be enhanced.

Key words: school health education, significance, problem, suggestions