Partnerships strengthen opportunities for meaningful health promotion in schools

Partnerships between Community Health and State Government departments demonstrate the benefit of collaboration to improve health and wellbeing in schools.

Community health embodies the ideal that 'together we can do more'. This is achieved through a whole of settings approach to health and wellbeing where agencies work together to address issues of concerns. This is especially important following COVID-19.

Since 2017, challenges building relationships with primary and secondary schools in the Inner East have included:

• Relying on one champion or contact provided within a school
• Schools' competing priorities
• Staff needing to prioritise education over additional programs and opportunities that address student health and wellbeing.

It has become even more challenging to re-engage with school since the COVID-19 pandemic.

AccessHC and the Department of Education and Training (DET) Respectful Relationships (RR) staff recognised the importance of working together to better engage and provide practical and tangible support for schools. This has evolved from coordinating support for schools to implement Respectful Relationships Education (RRE), to collaborating in partnership across a range of health priorities that address the schools' issues of concern.

The partners include AccessHC, DET RR, headspace Hawthorn, Link Health and Community and FVREE, bringing together community health - health promotion, education and gender equity expertise. DET has also provided an essential link to building relationships with schools. The partnership has created new pieces of work adapted to increase the scale of existing programs. Examples of the collaborative work that has come out of the Partnerships includes:

• Developing consent education training for school teachers
• Developing a set of Inclusive Language Resources
• Adapting gender equity tools designed for early childhood services into a student-led project for primary school students.

The partnership created a foundation to meaningfully engage schools, create projects that meet schools' needs and align with RRT. The collaborative approach has also built strong relationships between the partner organisations, relationships with schools and the capacity of the members.

This demonstrates the positive benefits of the DET RRE program as core within school curriculum. Through the supportive DET policy environment and DET staff resources to partner with Community Health - Health Promotion, together Access HC leveraged local resources, expertise and partnerships to demonstrate gender equity impacts in schools.

If you want to hear more about the partnership work that AccessHC are doing in schools, please email: health.promotion@accesshc.org.au