This paper reports on an ongoing comparative project on how school principals approach health promotion during the ongoing Covid-19 crisis in two country contexts, namely Malaysia and Switzerland. First, the paper presents the results of a quantitative survey of school principals in Malaysia and Switzerland. One part of the survey includes the School Promotion of Emotional and Social Health (SSPESH) scale, which will be validated. Second, the paper presents the preliminary results of health promotion profiles in terms of Malaysian and Swiss school principals’ practices. Third, the paper presents findings from the analysis of documents describing guidelines for school principals in the two different country contexts on specific strategies to prevent the spread of COVID-19. The findings from the document analysis are used to inform country differences with respect to the health promotion profiles identified. The SSPESH (Dix et al., 2019) is based on the World Health Organization (WHO)’s Health-Promoting Schools (HPS) framework (Langford et al., 2014) and measures the extent to which a school has implemented policies and practices that promote students' emotional and social health. The comparison of Switzerland and Malaysia is interesting because the two countries differ regarding educational governance. In Switzerland, school principals can set local priorities, but at the same time they have to follow cantonal guidelines. In contrast, Malaysia is more centralised: in the education sector, schools’ formal goals are predetermined. However, regardless of these differences, both countries face similar challenges in relation to the Covid-19 pandemic, but national and local contexts influence how school principals are authorised and enabled (cf. Sears & Marshall, 1990) to implement and adapt responses to challenges such as the Covid-19 crisis according to the local context. The analysis of the survey data includes responses from school leaders in Malaysia and three language regions in Switzerland (German, French and Italian), and it includes the psychometric properties with respect to the instrument validation in the four language versions. Moreover, the health promotion profiles are analysed within and across country contexts using latent class analysis. The study generates knowledge on health promotion in schools during the ongoing crisis and how factors at the national and local levels influence health promotion practices.

Dix, K. L., Green, M. J., Tzoumakis, S., Dean, K., Harris, F., Carr, V. J., & Laurens, K. R. (2019). The Survey of School Promotion of Emotional and Social Health (SSPESH): A brief measure of the implementation of whole-school mental health promotion. School Mental Health, 11(2), 294–308. Langford, R., Bonell, C. P., Jones, H. E., Pouliou, T., Murphy, S. M., Waters, E., Komro, K. A., Gibbs, L. F., Magnus, D., & Campbell, R. (2014). The WHO Health Promoting School framework for improving the health and well-being of students and their academic achievement. The Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, 4(CD008958). http://researchonline.lshtm.ac.uk/2548662/ Sears, J. T., & Marshall, J. D. (Eds.). (1990). Teaching about curriculum: critical inquiries. Teachers College Press.