Professional competencies are described as the individual’s potential preparedness to act in relation to a task, situation or work (Ellström and Kock 1996). The focus is in other words on agency, which is accentuated in the definition of professional competencies in health promotion in IUHPEs competency-framework and standards project (the CompHP-project): “a combination of the essential knowledge, abilities, skills and values necessary for the practice of health promotion” (Dempsey et al. 2011:3).Professional competencies requirements within the school system are generally highly specialized and well described, e.g. the stipulation of competencies in teacher education acts (Moos 2009). However, educational policy tasks schools with addressing a range of different issues, including health and health promotion, where the professional competencies are less clearly articulated. The usefulness of competency frameworks in health promotion, such as the one offered by the CompHP-project mentioned above, is impaired by an over-emphasis of system-centered perspectives (policy and organizational development), and an under-emphasis of education and learning, which is the main purpose of the school (Carlsson 2015).

Against this background, the purpose of this paper is to contribute to the discussion of professional competencies needed for supporting the application of the whole school approach in school health promotion. The paper is based on a conceptual synthesis of literature on professional competencies in school health promotion, guided by a policy and theoretical framework. Key problem-areas in relation to school health promotion are in this policy articulated as: linking health and education, cross-sectorial collaboration, management, coordination and professional development (IUHPE 2009 and 2012). The paper is delineating a double perspective on professional competencies in school health promotion, based on a distinction between people- and systems-centered perspectives on health promotion (Green and Tones 2010), and between individual and social learning (Illeris 2004; Nygren and Fauske 2009) - a distinction which also is applied in school health promotion research (see e.g. Deschnes et al. 2014). People-centered perspectives on professional competencies include cognitive, affective, inter-relational, and skills- and abilities related competency elements, and systems-centered perspectives include competency elements related to the technical-organizational and the socio-cultural learning environment in schools. The framework opens up to research questions on which competency elements and perspectives that is in focus and which are underplayed in conceptualizations of professional competencies, as well as questions on the links and interplay between these.

Conceptualizations of competencies tend to focus on learning (of e.g. certain skills), and forget about the wider purpose of education, i.e. questions concerning ‘what schools are for’ (Biesta 2010; Schwandt 2003). Biesta makes a distinction between three key educational purposes in schools (2010): Qualification in relation to professional competencies includes knowledge, skills, understanding, dispositions, and judgments that allow professionals to ‘do something’; Socialization inserts professionals in existing (social, cultural and political) ‘orders’ of doing and being, i.e. norms and values (e.g. justifications of democratic and empowering processes); Subjectification offers ways of becoming a subject and ways of being that hint at independence from existing orders (e.g. critical thinking and autonomy). These three purposes functions as analytical categories in the review of what is in focus and what is underplayed in the conceptualizations. The findings are also discussed in relation to key strategies for implementing activities and change processes in schools described in school development models: 1) provide direction for change; 2) build readiness for change; and 3) identify structures and practices that enable schools to conduct the needed actions (Samdal and Rowling 2011).

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