Health Promoting Schools (or HPS) is a school community focused national service funded by the Ministry of Health in New Zealand to help schools assess and address the health and wellbeing requirements of their students to advance student learning and achievement outcomes.
This report assesses how successful the Health Promoting Schools service has been across schools in New Zealand.
The following areas were examined to assess how well the service was helping schools, students, parents/whânau, and the community.
At a student level the research looked at:
- attendance
- stand-downs
- suspensions
- achievement.
At a school community level, the following areas were measured and evaluated:
- school effectiveness
- school leader effectiveness
- levels of parent and whânau engagement
- HPS facilitator effectiveness.
The findings show that when school effectiveness, leadership effectiveness, whânau engagement and HPS facilitator effectiveness are combined, schools see positive student outcomes in attendance, stand-downs and suspensions, and achievement in reading.