Save the Children summarise the potential benefits of this connection in their motto ‘supporting
school-age children to be healthy to learn and to learn to be
healthy’.
5 Their School Health and Nutrition programme
exemplified this, reaching almost six million children between 2005 and 2010. One of the quick wins identified for the
UN's Millennium Project is ‘providing free school meals for all
children using locally produced foods with take-home rations.’
6Very
long term benefits arise from the interaction of education and
health. In child development, the effective use of schools ofers lifelong benefits, for example better educational attainment when young predicts better biological ageing decades
later (using telomere lengths).7 Effects can span generations:
in encouraging local action for Health Promoting Schools, the
World Health Organization emphasised ‘the single most
important factor predicting a child's health is the mother's level of
education’.
8 Worldwide, as girls are spending longer in the
school environment, levels of mortality in the next generation
are already falling