Health-education policy interface: the implementation of the Eat Well Be Active policies in schools

Abstract

While grappling with their traditional core business of imbuing students with official curricular knowledge, schools have simultaneously, increasing demands to take on health promotion responsibilities. This paper examines the mandated implementation of the Eat Well Be Active (EWBA) Action Plan and its subsidiary ‘Smart’ policies in schools in the state of Queensland, Australia. Within the context of health promotion, the interaction between the health and education policy interfaces was explored. In particular, we paid close attention to the responses of the schools and their staff to the convergence of various health policies within their institutions. Drawing on Bernstein's concept of field, this paper reports our analyses of responses within the reproduction field to the imperatives of the Smart policies. The results suggest that there exists a disjunction between the recontextualising and reproduction fields in terms of the EWBA policy intent and implementation.

Keywords:

• Public health policy
• Policy implementation
• Obesity
• Health and physical education
• Bernstein

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the two anonymous reviewers who provided valuable and helpful suggestions on earlier drafts of this paper. The work described in this paper was funded by the Health Promotion Branch, Queensland Health (Grant ID: HPQ 00.01/14.1).