There is evidence to suggest that attitudes, beliefs, and behaviours- for example, those relating to smoking, physical activity, and food choices, but only -  learned during childhood show strong tracking into adulthood (Kelder 1994; Singh 2008; Whitaker 1997). Promoting healthy habits during the age of development is therefore of key importance (Langford 2014). Over the past 30 years, there have been several international initiatives to define and advance the role of schools in promoting and protecting health. The current work in school health promotion in Europe  is organized through the Schools for Health in Europe (SHE) Network with a  total of 54 reality among 43 countries (Simovska 2012). The network was founded in 1991 formerly named the European Network of Health Promoting Schools (ENHPS) in these years it has demonstrated progress in increasing the co-operation of the education and health sectors and in establishing health promotion as part of the core work of schools in several member states. In all this time the concept of health-promoting schools, even if under the same aims and scopes, has been interpreted differently in these different cultural, geographical and educational contexts, and only few qualitative studies have been conducted to investigate the effectiveness of the strategies used by health promoters to implement such initiatives (Hung 2014). This long experience has, indeed, brought empirical elements of success that can serve as useful benchmark to guide new initiatives or, simply, to stimulate non SHE countries to learn from effective experiences. Unfortunately even if this contribution represents a so called Communities of Practice (CoP) (Wenger 2003), it has never been systematically documented, in some ways reducing the direct advantage of being part of a network of experts. Furthermore new countries that can desire to be part of the network could be helped in avoiding unsuccessful choices having a sort of empirical guideline to be followed in order to maximize their participation. Given these premises we intend to analyze all the published and grey documentation of the 43 member countries experience in order to identify elements of success and discuss the existing benchmark indicators of portability.

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