Health needs: policy plan and school practice in Greece

Abstract

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to explore the concept of health‐related needs on a policy design and curriculum enactment basis in terms of the national school health education curriculum in Greek secondary education.Design/methodology/approachA single case study, using an ethnographic approach, was conducted in Greece, seeking to understand the continuum from policy design to curriculum enactment in respect of health‐related needs. Three sources of data were used to meet this goal: policy texts, observation, and interviews. Multilevel sampling was employed to select one secondary school as a site for “good practice”. Grounded theory coding, thematic analysis and critical discourse analysis identified themes associated with the idea of health‐related through the corpus of data.FindingsOn a policy plan level the concept of health‐related needs was coupled with and reduced to a predetermined list of health‐related subjects; and the list of health‐related topics had not been updated for long and was characterised by a rather biomedical orientation. On a school practice level the stage of needs assessment was not applied, the list of health‐related subjects advocated in the policy plan was used on a proactive, normative and top down basis, and the students' felt needs tended to be disregarded.Originality/valueThis study followed up the continuum from policy design to school practice regarding the concept and practice of health needs, highlighting the possibilities and the problems from both perspectives.