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Sexual Health Exchange 2003-4 Health-promoting school environments for HIV/AIDS education .A strong health-promoting school environment is a requirement to facilitate behavioural change through school-based HIV/AIDS education interventions. Such an environment has two dimensions: an organisational and a professional one (see Figure). The combination of both dimensions defines the strength of a school's health-promoting environment for HIV/AIDS education.
A model developed by the University of York (United Kingdom) was tested in 42 Namibian senior secondary schools catering for students aged 12 to 20 and representing just under half such schools in the country. The study showed that only 7% of schools had a strong support structure in place. On the organisational level, nine schools had none of the four aspects related to the organisational dimension in place, i.e. no coordinator, no policy, no health care and no community links. Twenty-eight had an HIV/AIDS coordinator only, and 6 more also had an official school health policy. On the professional level, teachers in 18 schools received no training on HIV/AIDS, teaching methods and counselling skills at all. In only three schools, were the teachers fully trained in all three aspects. When both dimensions were combined, 7 of the 42 schools (17%) lacked a health-promoting environment to support HIV/AIDS education while only 3 (7%) had a strong support structure in place. The majority of schools (64%) were in the basic to intermediate level. Surprisingly, there was no difference in strength of health-promoting environment between schools in rural and in (peri)urban areas. There was a difference however between small and large schools: small schools had considerably stronger environments than very large schools with over 1000 pupils. Bob Campbell and Fred Lubben, Department of Educational Studies, University of York, York YO10 5DD, United Kingdom; tel.: +44-1904-43.34.68, fax: +44-1904-43.34.44, e-mail: rmc1@york.ac.uk or fel11@york.ac.uk; and Claudia Tjikuua, Government of the Republic of Namibia, Ministry of Basic Education, Sport and Culture; P/Bag 13236, Windhoek, Namibia; fax: +264-61-23.13.67 A more detailed account of this study can be found in B. Campbell and F. Lubben, The provision of a health promoting environment for HIV/AIDS education: the case of Namibian senior secondary schools. In: International Journal of Educational Development, 23, p. 529-542, 2003.
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