School Nursing

School nursing is at the forefront of policy change in the UK and school nurses are seen as pivotal to child-centred public health practice. The government aims to make ‘this country the best place in the world for children to grow up’ (Department for Children, Schools and Families [DCSF] 2007). School nurses have a vital role to play in leading strategic partnerships under Children's trust arrangements and to see that national priorities are translated into local delivery plans. Yet the challenge is enormous - in early 2007, Unicef published its first ‘report card’ of child health in affluent countries, using a multi-dimensional overview of childhood. Unicef found child health and well-being in the UK as the poorest among 21 industrialised nations (UNicef Innocenti Research Centre [UIRC] 2007). This chapter seeks to examine some of the functions of school nursing and review its position in the twenty-first century. The government's renewed emphasis on public health, as well as the continued interest in children and young people, has provided all those who promote health in the school aged population with the potential to raise their profile. This opportunity requires all those involved in this field of employment to clarify the effectiveness of their work and make their interventions far more widely known.