among the lowest in Europe (Samdal, Dür & Freeman 2004; Kämppi et al. 2012;
Löfstedt et al. 2020).
Besides the obvious learning and teaching aspects, the school as a com-munity is also a unique resource, with possibilities to promote the health and development of students, their families, and school personnel (Tang et al. 2008) and also reduce health inequalities of the students (Sormunen 2012). Health promotion activities are often implemented in schools, since that is where most adolescents can be reached. All in all, for the development of effective health education, health promotion policy and practice, it is essential to investigate students’ health and health behaviours, and the factors that influence them (Currie et al. 2001).
Finland has a long tradition of participation in school-based surveys. Here one can point to the HBSC Study (Health Behaviour in School-aged Children), which has gained insights into adolescents’ health, well-being, and social envi-ronments since 1984 (HBSC Study 2021), and the national School Health Promo-tion study, which has monitored the well-being, health, and schoolwork of Finnish children and adolescents since 1996 (Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare 2020). Since 2000, the PISA study has been conducted not only to assess learning outcomes, but also to collect information on students’ attitudes to-wards school and learning. Over the years, these large-scale studies have con-tributed to the planning and evaluation of health promotion activities at school.
School environment scales were first included in the HBSC Study in the 1994 survey, but only a few studies have made substantial use of the HBSC data. In the late 1990s, Samdal (1998) addressed the issues in question in her doctoral thesis; however, since then there have been no equally comprehensive studies on the psychological school environment or on students’ subjective health, at least in the Finnish context.
In 2005, due to the worrying results regarding Finnish adolescents’ atti-tudes towards school, the Ministry of Education appointed a welfare committee to prepare proposals for action, the aim being to create conditions and struc-tures to support the well-being and school satisfaction of adolescents, and to promote opportunities for students to contribute to the everyday life of the school (Ministry of Education 2005). The work of the committee – and the scar-city of studies on this topic – led to the initiation of the current study, which forms part of a wider research project, i.e. STAGE (Students’ Engagement in School Life) at the University of Jyväskylä. The need for studies like the current study was affirmed in 2011; in that year the United Nation Convention on the Rights of the Child expressed concern over the fact that Finnish children were not doing well in the environment where they spent so much of their daily lives, and recommended research on the reasons underlying this phenomenon (Harinen & Halme 2012).
Measures to promote school children’s well-being have been widely dis-cussed in recent years. The well-being and health of school children has attract-ed increasing interest, gaining a foothold in public forums and political discus-sions. New guidelines for schooling have been developed, and these have
formed a step towards seeing student well-being as an important goal in itself.
In 2014, the new Student Welfare Act (Finlex 2020) took effect, and in 2016 the new National Core Curriculum was introduced (Finnish National Board of Ed-ucation 2016). Both of these documents highlighted the importance of promot-ing the prerequisites for the learnpromot-ing and well-bepromot-ing of students, and of the en-tire school community. The work has continued up to the present time. To con-tinue the work, a parliamentary committee was appointed in 2020 to prepare a National Child Strategy. The aim was to promote children’s rights for learning and development, to support schooling, and to support the work of educational staff and student care services (The Parliamentary National Child Strategy Committee 2021).
There has been increasing concern over the small minority of individuals who are not doing well at school. In the spring of 2020, the exceptional condi-tions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic raised further concerns about the well-being of adolescents. In Finland, students were taught remotely for two months.
During the remote learning period, anxiety was often expressed as to whether problems at home would reach a critical point and have an adverse effect on children (Sainio et al. 2020). Not all parents were able to support their children with schoolwork; moreover, for some children the lack of the daily school lunch was a real setback, as it might have been their only meal during the day. An emphasis was placed on the role of school as an environment for equal growth, as a social environment, and as an environment promoting students’ well-being. All these considerations supported the need to gain a better understand-ing of the school-related factors associated with adolescents’ health and well-being.
This doctoral thesis includes four sub-studies. These examined the quality of school life among Finnish comprehensive school students, and investigated how it relates to academic achievement, students’ health, health behaviours, and bullying victimization. Each sub-study also aimed to describe the preva-lence and nature of the phenomena in question (i.e. the quality of school life, students perceived health, health behaviours, bullying victimization, and its various manifestations). The overall aim of this thesis was that by applying ex-isting knowledge, together with the results of this study, it would be possible to obtain new insights into how students’ experiences of school relate to their health, plus a better understanding of the interplay of the relationships that ap-ply. It can be claimed that the knowledge produced by this study will be highly relevant in the promotion of adolescents’ health and well-being. There will also be potential utility in national decision-making, and in the support given to schools in developing the quality of school life. The data for the studies report-ed in this doctoral thesis were drawn from the Finnish part of the international Health Behaviour in School-aged Children Study.
2.1 Conceptualizing the school environment
2.1.1 The psychosocial school environment
The school environment consists of physical factors (the school building, the school yard, and physical conditions such as air conditioning, noise, and tem-perature) and psychosocial factors such as engagement, autonomy, demands, social support, and relationships (Henderson & Rowe 1998). The psychosocial school environment can also be defined as the social interactions existing within the school that are related to the students’ work situation. These include teacher support, work demands, and influence over schoolwork, and also students’
peer relations at school, encompassing factors such as bullying and isolation (Gillander Gådin & Hammarström 2003).
The school is a social place, and within it, learning occurs in a variety of situations. The school can have an impact on students’ well-being through its atmosphere and culture (non-formal school characteristics) as well as through the formal curriculum (St Leger & Nutbeam 2000; St Leger 2000; Henderson et al. 2008). Eccles and colleagues (1993) emphasized the importance of meeting the developmental needs of adolescents, referring to a “stage-environment fit”;
hence they took the view that optimal development occurs when the needs of developing individuals and the opportunities afforded them by their social en-vironments are in balance. The stage environment-fit perspective emphasizes that young people whose environments change in developmentally regressive ways are more likely to experience difficulties (Eccles et al. 1993). In contrast, positive outcomes are more likely to be experienced by young people whose social environments respond to their changing needs (Eccles et al. 1993). The main developmental needs of adolescents include steadily increasing opportu-nities for autonomy, opportuopportu-nities to demonstrate competence, caring, and