School based health education is overlaid by a complex policy terrain within which teachers and health professionals must locate and negotiate their practice. Current curricula in Australian, Canada, New Zealand and the United States and increasingly in UK and Scandinavia adopt school-based health education as a platform of prevention within broader public health agendas.  This agenda is rapidly advancing in other countries in Asia, such as Singapore, China, Japan and Malaysia. While schools are charged with the responsibility of implementing health education policy and curricula, they do this in a context where there are other powerful players with major investments in what happens in schools. These have always included governments and health officials and workers, but increasingly private enterprise has taken a keen interest in the possibilities of health education for commercial activity. The papers in this symposium examine these phenomena from a range of perspectives. In the context of the United States, Carolyn Vander Schee’s paper documents the private sector’s strategic appropriation of children’s health as a mechanism to colonize health education, curriculum and policies. It offers an analysis of privatization efforts and the associated discourses and rationalities that sustain these. In her paper, LeAnne Petherick asks how can health authorities from government and school personnel responsible for the health of students work together. She examines how power relations and discursive positions on health of these key players present both possibilities and barriers to the provision of health initiatives in the Canadian state of Manitoba. Michael Gard draws on an historical example of alcohol education in the United States to attempt to understand the context and argument for the contemporary pursuit of anti-obesity interventions in schools. Marie Öhman  and Mikael Quennerstedt take a broader philosophical approach to ask what possibilities and risk are involved in taking a salutogenic approach in Swedish schools. Given the salience of this discourse in curriculum and health policy discussion papers in Australia, UK, Sweden and the United States, this is a timely examination of the topic.