Health education crosses the boundary between education and health promotion in schools and raises complex policy, research and practice related debates about the key tasks of the school when it comes to health. The health sector tends to see schools as setting of interest for different kinds of interventions, aiming at health improvement and/or behaviour regulation. The education sector, however, focuses on “delivering” the curriculum across the subjects in a form that does not disturb the core subject content and/or academic attainment. The wider curriculum framework of Danish health education linked to the paradigm of the Health Promoting School, which includes the whole-school approach, socio-ecological concept of health, participatory teaching strategies and action competence as a learning outcome, are continuously being under-prioritized. In this presentation, we address the question: How come the critical approach to health education exists in the national curriculum but the practice is lagging behind? We will outline the main concepts, stemming from the critical health education and health promoting schools paradigm (Simovska & Carlsson, 2012; Simovska, 2012), which characterize the Danish national curriculum for health education, recently revised within the framework of the national school reform (Ministry of Education, 2014). The focus will be on the limited possibilities and dilemmas related to implementation of the critical aspects of the curriculum in practice, given the frames that the reform affords. The reform attempts to balance the traditional democratic values of Danish schools with the neo-liberal tendencies to reorient schools towards international competitiveness, performativity and accountability. We ask the question if such a balance is possible, and, if so, how can health education then respond to the wider purposes of education (Biesta 2014) and contribute to the development of children’s competences to deal with the complexities and uncertainties related to health, the individual and the society.

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