Country teams from Bhutan, Cambodia, China, Lao PDR, Thailand and Vietnam made presentations in relation to their countries’ current education sector response to school health and nutrition. The pre-Workshop Questionnaire responses, detailing elements of national response, are displayed in Appendix 6. A summary of the Situation Analyses presented by country teams on Day 1 of the Workshop is recorded below.

Policy

• Though school health and nutrition policies exist, there is still some way to go towards achieving a fully systematic policy covering both principles and process of implementation.
• There is fragmentation in policy without a coherent “big picture” (e.g. HIV/AIDS policies separate from nutrition policies).
• Look this week at developing SHN policy that is fully systematic both in directions to be taken and in processes for implementation.

• As yet, a range of different ideas are included in the context of what is meant by healthy school environment (e.g. sanitation, psychosocial, no smoking).
• Could be a need to develop stronger guidelines and a more comprehensive picture of what is meant by “healthy learning environment.”
• Much work going into upgrading school physical environment (e.g. water, sanitation).
• There is still room for considerable progress in implementation, especially in rural areas.
• There is a need for School Environment and Policy people to work together.

• There has been considerable progress, with a great deal of activity going on.
• There is fragmentation, with separate SHN, hygiene education, HIV/AIDS education and Life Skills education. There is a need for systematic understanding and a comprehensive, systematic package.
• There is considerable variation between rural and urban areas.
• Different countries have reached different levels of implementation; there is significant scope for lessons to be learned by sharing experiences of implementation.
• In- and pre-service training are key issues.

• All countries are doing excellent work in the area of deworming and scaling up the level of coverage. The challenge now is to build on the success of deworming programs to provide a systematic package for the delivery of other services children need (e.g. School feeding, screening and referral).
• Besides deworming, other services are much more patchily delivered.