Table 1 Modifications to the essential core conditions
Theme | Modification | Representative Quote |
|---|---|---|
Students as Change Agents | More emphasis on students’ voice | “I wonder about the student as change agent, the title is great, but it doesn’t, to me, it doesn’t get at student empowerment. I think if you can just tweak the language a tiny bit to bring out the student voice, so the students as leaders, so they are change agents” (P24). |
Clarify that students are change agents within the school through peer-to-peer interactions | “They [students] are much more likely to listen; they are much more likely to think about this [CSH] seriously when it’s coming from students from different grades” (P12). | |
School-specific Autonomy | Explicitly include school culture | “It’s probably a good idea to put a line in or a nuance in the school specific autonomy piece that recognizes cultural – various cultural influences in the demographic or something of the school” (P20). |
Demonstrated Administrative Leadership | No modifications made | “The role of principals, I 100% agree” (P41). |
Higher-level Support | New essential condition: Support and leadership from school district and government ministries | “The perfect situation is if you have leadership at the province and then you have leadership buying-in at the district level too … I think that having that district level support and that consistent, like not just a one-off, a consistent support and actually making room for it in the pile of many things, needs to be done” (P24). |
implementation of policy at the district and ministerial levels | “We’ve heard from the schools and from teachers time and again that it’s not going to happen, it’s not going to work until there is some kind of policy. And what I mean by that is until the Department of Education basically mandates that schools take this on, it’s not going to happen, which I didn’t see reflected in the essential conditions” (P1). | |
Maintain balance between building accountability around CSH and school autonomy | “I think in some ways what we have right now in the CSH world or school health world is we have so much school-specific autonomy that we aren’t getting the systems change. So every school is doing their own thing and every school is doing something different. So I think there’s a really interesting balance there when we want to change things at a systems or a district level or a provincial level where we need to respect that autonomy” (P44). | |
Dedicate School Champion(s) to Engage School Community | Pluralize champion to reflect the team of champions that lead CSH | “I would definitely put champions – just make that plural” (P18). |
Engage the school community rather than just the school staff | “You need to have a champion pushing things within the community, and schools are communities so it would make sense that it’s community not just teachers” (P36). | |
Community Support | Broaden definition to include parents/families | “We say school community and hope that people realize it means home, school, and community broader than outside those four walls. So that might be a tweak, you know. I think that parents defined in there or families defined in there could strengthen it” (P31). |
Quality and Use of Evidence | Collect data that is context-specific and meaningful to the school | “I think the big thing about evidence is that we need it to be local and meaningful. We need to give assistance in helping it be understood and just put into context and I think we are, we’re working harder to do that and to show places where the indicators and the core measurements are helping align with initiatives that are important to those who we are passing that data on to so that it becomes more meaningful to them. And then it becomes useful in a way by which therefore they want to monitor it and understand it (P4). |
Change definition to reflect the actual use of data | “We collected this data, now we have a survey, what are the results, what do they mean and what are we going to do about it are really challenging in school communities. The challenge is on the back end and actually using it. A lot of the data is out there, it’s just not being used” (P44). | |
Professional Development | No modifications made | “I would say that professional development needs to be a core condition. They’re not trained in this area of health necessarily. So they need that professional development to be able to fully understand why this [CSH] is important and buy in. To be those champions. To share it with their students, to share it with others in the school, to be able to speak the language and understand why the connection between being healthy and being able to learn” (P20). |