Background: The Health Promoting School (HPS) approach provides a strong foundation to improve students¡¦ overall health, including psychological well-being, which has its roots in resilience. The present study evaluates the effectiveness of a resilience-enhancing program building on the concept of HPS among a Chinese population.

Methodology: All mainstream schools in a socially disadvantaged region of Hong Kong were eligible and stratified random sampling was used to recruit both HPS as intervention schools and non-HPS as control schools. The participants include teachers and parents of grade 3 and 5 primary and grade 1 secondary school students (aged 8, 10 and 12 respectively). Validated surveys were used to assess resilience scores in both groups of schools before and after a series of resilience enhancing activities in HPS and ANOVA was used to compare the score changes between the 2 groups.

Results: Five primary and 4 secondary HPS and 4 primary and 4 secondary non-HPS were recruited, involving 4,918 parents and 602 teachers. Among primary and secondary parents the HPS group did not report a higher score than the non-HPS group. Among secondary teachers, the HPS group showed significantly higher scores than the non-HPS group (p =0.023 to <0.001).

Conclusion: The present study is the first to demonstrate the positive synergistic effect of a newly designed resilience-enhancing intervention program building on concept of HPS in schools among secondary teachers in Hong Kong. It was suggested that future initiatives may involve parent networking and school-family collaboration in fostering an even more resilient school environment.