Guidelines for Teachers

2.9 Good Practice in Slovenia: “Healthy school” Project

“Healthy school” project is a nationally launched and run project, within which a Slovenian network of healthy schools was established. The network comprises of more than a half of Slovenian primary schools and it is coordinated by the Slovenian Institute for public health. The network works on prevention of and reacting to children’s and youth health problems and implementing programs for promotion of physical and mental health for children, teachers and parents.

It combines education and health and enables the schools to become a better environment for children and teachers to enjoy learning, teaching and working. It promotes well-being of everyone and development of social capital of all the children and staff. They are designed as environments that contribute to elimination of inequalities in health and promote cooperation with other sectors that work on improvement of children’s inclusion, sense of belonging and well-being.

The priorities, fields of work and guidelines for implementation are set on an annual basis by the Slovenian institute for public health. Mental health was the main topic for several years and within this topic most of the work and discussions were dedicated to bullying, its causes, consequences and how to deal with or eliminate it.

The main activities for the promotion of well-being at schools and fighting against bullying were:

• Monitoring and assessing the well-being of pupils at schools using child-friendly and interesting interactive methods. The results were presented also to the councils of parents and representatives of schools.
• For the National Conference of Healthy schools, pupils produced a theatre play titled Stop Bullying. The play was presented at the conference.
• Research “Perspectives on bullying in primary schools” was prepared
• A Rap Song about bullying was produced by pupils
• Discussions with children on tolerance and non-violent communication, when pupils were given time to respond to some of their basic needs, such as friendship, love, co-operation, to clarify their understanding of values, to sit and work in silence to think through their own thoughts, helping children to be relaxed and unstressed but focussed on their activities, opportunity for role-play so that skills associated with negotiation, co-operation and assertiveness were developed.
• Design and production of materials to promote healthy peer-to-peer relations
• Promotion of a peaceful climate in the classroom and on the school site, taking children to beautiful places to experience peaceful places and encourage them to value them, pupils had a chance to set their own targets for their work and behaviour, were given opportunities for decision making, influencing schools’ behaviour policy that clearly defined how the school puts emphasis on behaving well and positive thinking, which helped children to understand the potential consequences of giving way to peer pressure.