Health promoting schools

The idea of ​​the Health Promoting Schools (HPS) network was tested in 1991 in Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Poland. As a result of negotiations, an international agreement was signed between the European Commission (EC), the Council of Europe (CoE) and the WHO Regional Office for Europe under the auspices of the three organizations. European Network of HPS was officially established and opened for membership in 1992 and began to expand rapidly. To date, the project involves 45 countries. In May 1999, the Republic of Kazakhstan was presented with a certificate indicating that Kazakhstan is now an official member of the European Network of HPS.
The Secretariat of the Network is located at the WHO Collaborating Center for School Health Promotion at the University College South Denmark. The HPS in the countries of Eastern Europe and Central Asia are supported by the Moscow branch of the HPS Network on the basis of the Scientific Research Institute of Hygiene and Health of Children and Adolescents of the State Scientific Center for Children’s Health.
The European network of health promoting schools, which includes Kazakhstan schools, has been operated for more than 17 years and in many participating countries the project has shown significant progress in strengthening cooperation between education and health sectors in the provision of health as one of the main integral parts of school activities.
The school is an institution in which activities to protect students’ health and motivate them to conduct a healthy lifestyle are educational tasks and become no less important than, for example, learning literacy and numeracy.
Schools that promote and protect health help students to get general and special knowledge, skills in understanding, analyzing and synthesizing information, and skills in finding solutions to local and global problems.