Health education has been charged with enhancing the health of young people. This presents a potential dilemma for health education’s place in the curriculum. No other subject is expected to change the choices that children and young people make in their everyday lives. The complex landscape that is health education is further complicated by expectations that schools will address the demands of a culturally and socially diverse student population; and that schools can and should help to solve many of children and young people’s social and health problems. This is when there is still widespread disagreement and debate about both the methods and goals of health education and when teachers are dealing with the morally and politically contested nature of health education subject matter. Consequently, HE teachers must not only accommodate the diverse needs, values and opinions of students, they must also model social justice principles while managing sensitive and challenging subject matter. At the same time there is often considerable doubt and even concern as to how health messages are taken up by students. The papers in this symposium address these issues by firstly, exploring the potential of health education to deal with health critically and secondly, examining how health education and health messages are taken up by beginning health and physical education teachers and by students in schools. Leahy’s and Wright’s paper begins the session by asking, in the context of the Australian national curriculum in Health and Physical Education, is it possible for a health education curriculum to ‘educate’ using a critical inquiry approach and what pedagogies are needed to realize this potential? In the same context, Wright, O’Flynn and Welch examine how health and physical education preservice teachers imagine their work and how they deal with the complexity of their future teaching environment. The papers by Burrows and McCormack and Beausoleil and Petherick both ask children in primary schools about how they make sense of public health messages about health. Both suggest that the ways the children make sense of health is not at all straightforward nor always a positive influence on their lives.