FITeens Toolkit

7 A school is an excellent setting where health education and intervention programmes can be implemented because this is the place where it is possible to reach virtually all children and adolescents. Consequently, school-based interventions have been used for the treatment and prevention of a number of health conditions, including obesity, diabetes, tobacco, alcohol and substance use, sexual abuse, depression, anxiety, suicide, and eating disorders (Amini et al., 2015; Hennessy et al., 2015). School-based interventions have also been used for promoting a broader range of energy balance-related behaviours such as physical activity, sedentary time, healthy diet, and sleep duration (Sevil et al., 2019). Often, the health promotion programs implemented in schools are offered as a supplement to the regular curriculum (Peters et al., 2009). Adolescence is considered as the best period for health education and health promotion programmes since many health-risk behaviours, which contribute to the leading causes of morbidity and mortality among youth and adults, develop or augment during this sensitive period of life (Peters et al., 2009). Therefore, early adolescence is a crucial time to intervene and interrupt the trajectory leading to poor health in adulthood. Sevil et al. (2019) have argued that many of the school-based health interventions have focused on a single health behaviour, reporting non-significant or small effect sizes. Recently, therefore, researchers have shifted