Mental illness is a major health burden worldwide and represents the health problems with the heaviest financial burden in Norway. Half of chronic mental disorders emerge before the age of 14, and mental health problems in youth are increasing. The Norwegian government has implemented the interdisciplinary topic "Health and life skills" (HLS) as part of a curriculum reform in primary and secondary education to provide pupils with competencies to promote health and self-efficacy. School-based interventions may improve mental health and academic performance, but their effects depend on the quality of implementation. There are large variations in how HLS is implemented within and across schools due to lack of national guidelines and a reliance on teachers’ professional judgment. Delayed implementation of the reform for some grades combined with access to longitudinal nationwide registry linkages allows for a natural experiment. This represents an unique opportunity to investigate the impact of diverse implementation quality and methods of a politically determined, long-term, and population-wide reform.
The aim of this study is to evaluate how variations in the implementation of HLS relate to the intervention’s effect on pupils' mental health, quality of life, school environment, academic performance, and dropout. HeaLS will collect new HLS implementation data from national samples of teachers/employees, school principals and school owners. Information from these key samples will be combined with prior linked data for 750 000 pupils from existing national registries and large surveys, including educational, health, and background information.
The interdisciplinary research group includes researchers specialized in education, mental and public health, health promotion, classroom research, school surveys, register-based studies and advanced multi-level modeling.
The evaluation may affect further implementation and practice of HLS nationally and globally and thereby promote pupils’ mental health and academic performance and thus also their inclusion in society.
