Rural Conditions for Student Health Work: How Conditions, Professions and Place Shape Everyday Practice

How is student health work shaped in rural schools? This project examines how organisational, professional and geographical conditions influence the leadership, organisation and practice of student health work and the possibilities for developing more preventive approaches.

Student health work is a central part of the school’s mission and contributes to students’ learning, development and wellbeing. However, the conditions for student health work vary across geographical contexts. In rural areas, everyday practice is influenced by long distances, small schools, limited access to specialised expertise and challenges related to recruitment and competence provision.

The GEA project (Rural Conditions for Student Health Work) investigates how student health work is led, organised and carried out in rural schools. Particular attention is given to how organisational, professional and geographical conditions shape everyday practices and influence opportunities to develop preventive and health-promoting approaches.

The project is conducted in close collaboration with the Municipality of Härjedalen and combines observations, interviews, focus groups, surveys and action research. It consists of two interconnected sub-studies. The first maps existing structures and practices within student health work. The second is designed as an action research study in which researchers and practitioners collaboratively identify and develop the organisational and professional conditions needed to strengthen preventive student health practices.

The project is informed by the Theory of Practice Architectures, which provides an analytical framework for understanding how practices are shaped by cultural-discursive, material-economic and social-political arrangements. By examining both opportunities and constraints in everyday student health work, the project aims to generate empirically grounded and practice-oriented knowledge that can support the development of sustainable student health structures in rural schools. The findings are expected to be relevant not only for municipalities in the Jämtland Härjedalen region but also for international research on student health work, school development and rural education.