HeLit-Schools: Whole-of-School Approach and Organisational Change to Promote Health Literacy in the School Setting in Germany

Health literacy contributes to promoting and maintaining child and adolescent health over the life-course. Childhood and adolescence represent key stages for addressing skill development, shaping positive health behaviours and laying the foundations for healthy lifestyles. Enhancing health literacy of children and adolescents is important for healthy development. However, the impact of social disadvantage on unequal health and education opportunities emphasises the need to plan and implement concepts beyond personal health literacy. Organisational health literacy targets the promotion of health literacy on an environmental level by adapting an institution or setting. Schools are critical settings to facilitate health literacy learning because they can reach almost all school-aged children. Implementing a health literacy whole-of-school approach can respond to student health literacy needs linked to their social family status and associated unequal health and education opportunities. Organisational health literacy interventions will also support the school to become health literate, but research to inform such a framework is scarce. To close this gap, the Health-Literate Schools (HeLit-Schools) project aims to develop and test a concept for organisational health literacy for schools in Germany. The scope of this chapter is to present key findings and discuss the future directions regarding the development of health literate schools.