Abstract

The European Union strategy on health and safety at work underlines the necessity of strengthening the prevention culture by means of education, awareness training and anticipating new and emerging risks in order to maintain and improve the quality of work. Occupational health and safety has to be part of an integrated strategy to encompass all the necessary aspects of education, training, research and innovation for tomorrow’s European Union. In this sense, it shows of good practice examples for school and vocational education throughout the member states European union, representing all stages until the end of compulsory education and covering a whole set of approaches, methods and tools to integrate occupational safety and health into the learning process and in the working environment inside and outside of schools. Due to the different settings, the editors assume that it is not possible or desirable to create one single, general or global model of a health promoting school. Every model is a result of dialogue and consensus among its ‘constructors’ and has meaning with a certain value-framework in a particular context. The health promoting school is more a process of contextual interpretation than an outcome of the implementation of global principles. Nevertheless, the different models can be used as a basis in dialogue processes among the health promoting school stakeholders throughout Europe, aiming at developing more sophisticated and challenging new constructions, rather than as ‘objective’ truths or normative standards.