Health4Life is now live! Empowering young people to improve their physical health

We are excited to announce that Health4Life is now available as part of our evidence-based suite of prevention programs!

What is Health4Life?

Health4Life is the first online health education program teaching year 7-8 secondary school students to: eat healthily, be more physically active, adopt healthy sleep habits, limit sedentary recreational screen time, and remain alcohol, smoke- and vape-free. These major six factors (“The Big 6”) can significantly impact youth physical and mental health now and in the future.

Evidence-based and aligned with the Australian Health and Physical Education (HPE) and NSW PDHPE curriculum, Health4Life aims to empower 12–14-year-olds to improve their physical and mental health, and to prevent the risk of chronic disease.

Read more about the Big Six modifiable factors here.

What is the background?

The Health4Life online program was co-designed with school students, educators, and researchers across Australia. It involves 6 online lessons, aimed to be delivered weekly through suitable classes i.e. health education, PDHPE, wellbeing. Years 7-8 is an important time for prevention and early intervention, as these are ages where onset of mental disorders typically emerge and unhealthy behaviours adopted during this time tend to continue into adulthood.

What does Health4Life look like?

The Health4Life program is made up of different components that work together to promote learning:

Online lessons: six 20-minute online cartoon-based storyline lessons delivered in class.
Stop & Think activities: interactive exercises within the online lessons to encourage students to reflect and think critically.
Self-guided quizzes: interactive online quizzes at the end of each online lesson to test and consolidate students’ knowledge.
Additional activities: a suite of classroom and homework activities for each lesson to reinforce key messages and help students to apply knowledge.
Lesson summaries: graphic summaries for students and teachers to refer to for key information and concepts presented in each lesson.

What’s needed from teachers/schools?

Almost nothing! The program was designed for minimal burden on teachers. Teachers simply allocate 6 lessons for the program and facilitate student registration/login to the OurFutures website. Any extra material (such as additional activities) and information is supplied in the teacher portal on the website (including a syllabus mapping document and implementation guidelines).

All students will need a device to work from (preferable). A back up method is for a teacher to share the cartoon lessons at the front of the class on a projector.
Headphones are needed so students can individually listen to the cartoon storylines, however lessons have been built for reading along (without sound) if not available.

Proven student benefits

The evaluation of Health4Life was one of the largest school-based prevention clinical trials from 2019 to 2022, involving >6600 students from 71 schools across NSW, QLD, and WA. Students who completed the Health4Life lessons had greater knowledge about risky health behaviours (up to 2 years later), improved health behavioural intentions, and improved mental health outcomes in the short-term. Specifically:

The vast majority of students (88%) felt the skills and information would help them be healthy in the future.
75% of students rated the Health4Life Program good or very good.
76% found the information helpful.
Most students (70%) reported they were likely/very likely to use the skills and information taught in the Health4Life Program in their own lives.
Results showed that compared to health education as usual (control group), students who received Health4Life had:
- Increased knowledge about the Big 6 health behaviours.
- Greater intentions to improve their sleep duration and reduce screen time.
- Less intentions to try alcohol and tobacco.
- Less symptoms of psychological distress and depression.