Lesson 18 · What are the opportunities for improving young people's health?
Applying the SDGs to promote the health of young people in a local community
This is the last lesson of the module, and it is the one where everything in it has to work together. A global framework agreed by 193 countries has to be made useful on one street, in one town, for a few hundred young people — without becoming a poster with seventeen coloured squares on it. That translation is called localisation, it is a real discipline with real failure modes, and doing it well is what this lesson is for.
A regional high school of 800 students decides to "support the Sustainable Development Goals". It paints the seventeen coloured squares on a wall near the canteen, runs an assembly, and organises a mufti day that raises $1,400 for an overseas water charity. The local paper covers it. Students can name several goals afterwards who could not before.
Meanwhile, in that same town: around a third of students do not eat breakfast, the only bus to the neighbouring town where the youth health service is located runs twice a day, and the sports ground has no lighting, so nothing organised happens after five o'clock in winter.
Was the school's programme worthwhile? Write down a yes-or-no verdict and then argue the other side as strongly as you can. Then answer the question that matters: what could the school realistically do, and what people or resources would it need, to change something on that second list?
- Explain what localisation of the SDGs means, and why local government is where most of the goals are actually delivered.
- Distinguish awareness activity from localisation, and say why the difference matters.
- Work from a local health need to the goals, rather than from the goals to a poster.
- Combine the SDGs with the Ottawa Charter, using each for what it is good at.
- Design a proposal that names its actors, partners, costs, measures and survival plan.
- Evaluate a proposal honestly, including whether it reaches the young people who are being left behind.
- Localisation — adapting the global goals to a local context, so that local priorities, actions and measures are expressed through them.
- Local government — councils, which control the built environment, recreation facilities, libraries, planning and many community services.
- Needs assessment — the process of establishing what a community's health needs actually are, before designing anything.
- Asset-based approach — starting from what a community already has — clubs, halls, people, networks — rather than only from its deficits.
- Baseline — the measurement taken before an initiative starts, without which change cannot be demonstrated.
- Indicator — the specific measure used to track progress against a target.
- Disaggregation — reporting results separately by group, so that an inequity is visible rather than hidden in an average.
- Process measure — a measure of activity delivered, such as sessions run or people attending.
- Outcome measure — a measure of the change achieved in health or its determinants.
- Co-design — designing a programme together with the people it is for, as decision-makers rather than consultees.
- Sustainability — in this context, whether an initiative continues after its initial funding and staff have gone.
- SDG-washing — presenting existing or superficial activity as contributing to the goals without changing any decision.
The goals were agreed by national governments, but the United Nations itself makes the point that a large majority of the 169 targets cannot be reached without action by local government. That is not a diplomatic courtesy. Look at what a council actually controls, and set it against Lesson 5's determinants and Lesson 16's action areas.
| Council responsibility | Goals it delivers | Ottawa action area |
|---|---|---|
| Parks, sportsgrounds, pools, lighting, shade | 3 · 11 · 13 | Create supportive environments |
| Footpaths, cycleways, road design, crossings | 3 · 11 | Create supportive environments |
| Planning and land use, including what may open near a school | 3 · 11 | Build healthy public policy |
| Libraries, halls, community centres, youth spaces | 4 · 10 · 11 | Strengthen community action |
| Community grants and youth programmes | 3 · 10 | Strengthen community action |
| Food safety, water quality, waste, local environment | 2 · 6 · 11 | Build healthy public policy |
So localisation is the practice of running the goals in both directions. Downwards, a council asks what the goals mean here — which of its own decisions bear on them. Upwards, it reports local data against the global indicators, which is what makes a local result comparable and visible beyond the town.
Several Australian cities and councils now do this formally, publishing what is usually called a Voluntary Local Review — the municipal equivalent of the national report in Lesson 17. Universities, schools, health districts and non-government organisations do the same thing less formally.
Quick check: Localisation of the SDGs is best described as:
The school in Card 01 did something real, and the fair verdict has two parts. Awareness activity has genuine value: students learned something, the school signalled that these issues matter, $1,400 went somewhere useful, and Lesson 13 established that awareness is often where advocacy begins. Dismissing it entirely is the cheap answer.
But it changed nothing on the second list, and the second list is where that school's young people actually lose health. Breakfast, transport to a health service, and somewhere to be active after dark are all local, all measurable, and all sit squarely inside the goals — Goal 2, Goal 3, Goal 10, Goal 11. The school engaged with the goals as a topic rather than as a tool, and that is the distinction the dot point's verb, "being used", is pointing at.
| Awareness activity | Localisation | |
|---|---|---|
| Starts from | The goals | A local need, identified with the community |
| Produces | Knowledge, visibility, some funds | A changed condition |
| Who is involved | Those who turn up | Those affected, as decision-makers |
| Measured by | Participation and money raised — process measures | Change against a baseline — outcome measures |
| Lasts | Until the end of the event | As long as the arrangement that delivers it |
| Example here | The mural, the assembly, the mufti day | A breakfast club, a bus timetable change, lights on the ground |
Notice that the right-hand column does not always require new cash spending: a school may be able to use existing staff and community channels. Consultation still takes time, and inclusive outreach may need practical resources such as transport, accessible formats or support for participation. A timetable can also change through advocacy rather than a direct payment — the Lesson 13 skill applied to a Lesson 17 framework. The difference between the columns is partly a difference in where you start and partly in the resources needed to reach young people fairly.
SDG-washing, and how to recognise it
Presenting existing or superficial activity as contributing to the goals, without any decision having changed, is now common enough to have a name. The test from Lesson 17 applies unchanged at local scale: would any decision have been different without the framework? If a school would have run the mufti day anyway and simply labelled it with a goal number afterwards, the goals did no work. That does not make the mufti day bad; it makes the SDG claim decorative.
True or false: A school that paints the seventeen goals on a wall and fundraises for an overseas charity has localised the SDGs.
This is the sequence to use in the activities, and in any question that asks you to propose something. Start at step 1, not at step 3. Almost every weak proposal starts with a solution somebody already liked and works backwards.
Establish the need, with the community. Use data where it exists — local health district profiles, Australian Bureau of Statistics community profiles, school data — and ask the young people themselves. Reach beyond the ones already in organised sport or student leadership, because those are the young people least likely to be the ones being left behind.
Name the goals and targets it sits under. Usually SDG 3 plus two or three others, and the others are where the causes are. Name them with mechanisms, not icons.
Find the assets before the deficits. What already exists — a hall, a club, a bus, a coach, a group of parents, a community organisation with trust? Building on an existing asset is the single best predictor that something survives.
Design across at least three Ottawa action areas, naming for each one what changes, who must act, and roughly what it costs. Lesson 16's outdoor gym is the warning about designing in only one.
Set a baseline and an indicator. What will you measure, how, before as well as after, and will you report it separately for the groups most at risk? A proposal without a baseline cannot demonstrate anything.
Say how it survives. Who owns it in three years, and what makes that true? If the answer is "the grant will be renewed", it has not been answered.
The two frameworks do different jobs and should not be merged. The SDGs tell you what matters and how to measure it, and they connect a local problem to causes outside the health sector. The Ottawa Charter tells you what kind of action to take. A proposal with goals but no action areas is a diagnosis with no treatment; one with action areas but no goals has no measurement framework and no argument for why anyone outside health should care.
Fill the gaps. Type one word in each box.
Adapting the global goals to a local context is called . A measurement taken before an initiative begins, without which change cannot be shown, is called a . Reporting results separately by group so an inequity is visible is called .
Take the second list from Card 01 and run the method. The need chosen, with students, is that there is nowhere to be physically active after school in winter, and no way to reach the youth health service. Both came from young people rather than from staff, and both are specific enough to act on.
| Component | Goal | Ottawa action area | Who must act | Measure |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Lighting on the sportsground, extending winter use to 8 pm | 3 · 11 | Supportive environments | Council, with a capital grant | Hours of use per week, counted before and after |
| Two additional late-afternoon bus services on school days | 3 · 10 · 11 | Healthy public policy | Transport operator and state transport authority, after advocacy | Attendance at the youth health service by young people from this town |
| Breakfast programme run through an existing community organisation | 2 · 3 · 4 | Supportive environments | School, community organisation, local food suppliers | Students eating breakfast, surveyed against the baseline |
| A youth reference group with a real budget and a place on the council's youth committee | 10 · 16 | Strengthen community action | Council, formally | Decisions in which young people held a vote |
| Coaching and skills sessions for eight weeks, then handed to the local club | 3 · 4 | Develop personal skills | Local sporting club, with a small grant | Participants retained by the club at six months |
Three features of this proposal are worth naming explicitly, because they are what an examiner is looking for.
Every row has a named actor, and three of the five are not the school. That is health in all policies at local scale: the council, a transport authority, a community organisation and a sporting club are all doing health work. A proposal in which the school does everything has misunderstood the framework.
Every row has a measure, and the measures are outcomes rather than activity. "Hours of use" rather than "lights installed". "Retained at six months" rather than "sessions run". Lesson 14's ladder of activity, output and impact applies here unchanged.
Two rows are designed to outlive the funding. The coaching is explicitly handed to an existing club, and the reference group is given a standing place rather than a project. Those are answers to step 6, and they are the reason this proposal would still exist in three years when the grant has gone.
Odd one out. Three of these are outcome measures. Which one is a process measure?
Five questions will separate a serious local proposal from a well-meaning one, and they are worth applying to your own work before someone else does.
- Who decided? If young people were surveyed but held no vote, this is consultation, not partnership. Lesson 16's ladder is the tool, and the honest answer is usually one rung lower than the proposal claims.
- Who does it reach, and who does it miss? A programme delivered through school and sporting clubs systematically misses the young people who have disengaged from both — who are frequently the ones being left behind. Naming who is missed is the "leave no one behind" principle applied to your own design.
- What changes, and how would you know? A baseline, an indicator, and disaggregation. Without the first you cannot show change; without the third you cannot show whether you widened a gap while improving an average, which this module has now warned about four times.
- Who acts outside the health sector? If every actor is a health actor, the SDG framework has added nothing and the Ottawa Charter alone would have served.
- What survives? Ownership by an existing organisation, a standing arrangement, or an infrastructure change that persists. "The council will review it" is not survival.
And a sixth, which is uncomfortable and belongs in the strongest answers: is this the biggest thing available, or the easiest? Lighting a ground is visible and popular. Changing a bus timetable is neither, and may matter more. The socio-ecological measures are usually the harder ones to get, which is exactly why Lesson 16 listed mediation as a core strategy rather than a complication.
Text description
- A flow diagram of six steps for localising the Sustainable Development Goals, numbered and running top to bottom.
- Step one, establish the need with the community.
- Step two, name the goals and targets with their mechanisms.
- Step three, find the existing community assets.
- Step four, design across at least three Ottawa Charter action areas.
- Step five, set a baseline and a disaggregated indicator.
- Step six, say how the initiative survives its funding.
- Steps one, five and six are marked often skipped, with a dashed outline.
- Below the flow, two boxes state the division of labour between the frameworks: the Sustainable Development Goals tell you what matters and how to measure it, and the Ottawa Charter tells you what kind of action to take.
Activities · put the method to work
Run the six steps for the community you actually live in. Use your own local government area, and use real data where you can find it — local health district profiles, Australian Bureau of Statistics community profiles, and your council's own plans.
Establish one need affecting young people, supported by at least one piece of local evidence and by what young people themselves say. State how you would reach young people who are not in organised sport or student leadership.
Map it to SDG 3 and at least two other goals, writing the mechanism for each in a full sentence.
List the assets your community already has that could carry part of the solution. Name them specifically — an actual hall, an actual club.
Build the five-column table from Card 07: component, goal, action area, who must act, measure. At least three action areas, and at least two actors outside the health sector.
Set your baseline and indicator, and say which groups you would report separately and why.
Answer the survival question without using the word "funding".
Then apply Card 08's six questions to your own proposal and write down the two weakest answers honestly. Every real proposal has them, and identifying your own is a better demonstration of understanding than a plan that claims none.
Match each proposal component to the actor who must deliver it.
- Lighting the sportsground
- Two extra late-afternoon buses
- A school breakfast programme
- A youth reference group with a budget
- Council, through a capital works grant
- The transport operator and state authority, after advocacy
- The school with a community organisation and local suppliers
- Council, by giving it a standing place and a vote
You have ten minutes in front of your council's youth committee to pitch the proposal from Activity 1. Prepare it properly, then take the questions.
Write the opening ninety seconds. The need, the evidence, and what you are asking for — in that order, and with a number in it.
"Why is this the council's job and not the health department's?" This is the question you will actually be asked, and Card 04 is the answer. Name the specific council responsibilities involved.
"We already run a youth programme. Why isn't that enough?" Answer without dismissing it — identify which action area or which group it does not reach.
"How will we know if it worked?" Baseline, indicator, timeframe, and the disaggregation. Resist offering a process measure here.
"Residents near the ground will object to noise and lights until eight o'clock." This objection is reasonable. Mediate it — what would you offer, and what would you concede?
Finally, the question to put to yourself: if the council funded only one component, which would you choose, and would that still be worth doing on its own? Some components collapse without the others and some stand alone, and knowing which is which is what makes a proposal negotiable rather than all-or-nothing.
Propose how the Sustainable Development Goals could be applied to promote the health of young people in a local community. Justify your proposal.
Propose asks you to put forward a plan, and the second sentence asks you to justify it, so both are marked. The strongest structure starts from a specific local need and reaches the goals in the second paragraph — because a proposal that starts from the goals produces a poster, which is the failure Card 05 describes.
Plan: invent a specific, plausible community and need; map to goals with mechanisms; components across action areas with actors; baseline and disaggregation; survival; then the honest limitation.
In a regional town of around 6,000 people, young people report that there is nowhere to be physically active after school in winter, because the sportsground is unlit, and that the nearest youth health service is in a town 20 minutes away served by two buses a day, neither of which runs after school. Around a third of students report not eating breakfast. These needs were identified with students rather than for them, including through a youth service rather than only through school and sporting clubs, since those channels miss the young people least likely to be active.
These needs sit under SDG 3, but their causes sit elsewhere: Goal 11, since lighting, transport and public space are built-environment decisions; Goal 2, since breakfast is a food security and nutrition issue affecting concentration and learning; Goal 10, because the young people worst affected by an absent bus service are those whose families have no second car; and Goal 4, because poor nutrition and disengagement affect school participation, which in turn shapes long-term health.
In a regional town of around 6,000 people, young people report three related problems: the sportsground is unlit, so nothing organised happens after five o'clock in winter; the nearest youth health service is 20 minutes away in a neighbouring town served by only two buses a day, neither running after school; and around a third of students do not eat breakfast. These needs were established with young people rather than for them, and deliberately through a local youth service as well as through school and sporting clubs, because those two channels systematically miss the young people least likely to be active and most likely to be disengaged — the population the commitment to leave no one behind is specifically about. Although these problems sit under SDG 3, good health and well-being, their causes sit under other goals, which is where the proposal must act. Goal 11 covers lighting, transport and public space, since these are built-environment decisions rather than health service decisions. Goal 2 covers breakfast as a question of food security and nutrition, which affects concentration, learning and long-term chronic disease risk. Goal 10 is engaged because the young people most affected by an absent bus service are those whose families cannot provide a second car, so the transport gap converts an economic inequality directly into a health inequity. Goal 4 is engaged because nutrition and disengagement both affect school participation, which shapes income, health literacy and health across a lifetime. The proposal has five components, designed across four Ottawa Charter action areas and deliberately building on assets the town already has. Lighting the sportsground creates a supportive environment and is delivered by the council through a capital grant, measured by hours of use per week counted before and after installation. Two additional late-afternoon bus services on school days constitute healthy public policy, delivered by the transport operator and state authority following advocacy by the youth reference group, and measured by attendance at the youth health service by young people from this town. A breakfast programme run through an existing community organisation creates a supportive environment and is measured by a survey of students eating breakfast against a baseline taken beforehand. Eight weeks of coaching, then handed to the local sporting club, develops personal skills and is measured by participants still playing with the club at six months, which is an outcome rather than an activity. Finally, a youth reference group with a real budget and a standing place on the council's youth committee strengthens community action, and is measured by the number of decisions in which young people actually held a vote. Three features justify this proposal. First, three of the five components are delivered by actors outside the health sector, which is what the SDG framework contributes over and above the Ottawa Charter: it supplies the argument that a council and a transport authority are health actors. Second, every component has an outcome measure and a baseline, and results would be reported separately for young people from low-income households and for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander young people, because an initiative that raises an average while widening a gap has failed the principle it claims to serve. Third, two components are designed to outlive their funding: the coaching is handed to an existing club rather than run by an external provider, and the reference group is given a standing place rather than a project. The proposal's weakest point should also be stated: the bus services are the component most likely to be refused, because they carry a recurrent cost to an authority outside the town, and they are also the component that most directly addresses the inequity. That is the harder and more valuable change, and pursuing it would require sustained advocacy and mediation rather than a single submission — which is precisely why the Ottawa Charter names mediation as a core strategy rather than treating opposition as evidence that a measure is wrong.
A school paints the seventeen Sustainable Development Goals on a wall, holds an assembly, and raises $1,400 for an overseas water charity. Evaluate this as an application of the SDGs to improve the health of young people in that community.
Evaluate requires a judgement with criteria and both sides weighed. The easy answer — that this is tokenism — is half right and scores in the middle band, because it dismisses real value rather than weighing it. The strong answer credits what the activity achieves, then shows precisely what it does not.
Plan: criteria first; genuine strengths; then the gap between awareness and localisation; the SDG-washing test; a judgement; then what should have been done.
The programme has real merits. It raises awareness, which the Charter recognises as developing personal skills, and awareness is frequently where advocacy begins. It signals institutional commitment, which shapes what students regard as normal. The funds raised produce a benefit, and Goal 6 is a legitimate health goal with a direct mechanism through diarrhoeal disease in children.
Judged as an application to improve the health of young people in that community, however, it does not succeed. No local condition changed. The measures available are process measures — attendance, dollars raised, goals students can name — and no baseline was taken for any local health indicator. Nobody who was not already inclined to participate was reached, and no young person held a decision. Applying the test from Lesson 17: would any decision have gone differently without the framework? If the mufti day would have run regardless and was labelled with a goal number afterwards, the goals did no work and the claim is decorative.
Evaluated as health education, the school's programme has genuine merit; evaluated as an application of the Sustainable Development Goals to improve the health of young people in that community, it largely fails, and the distinction between those two judgements is the substance of this answer. Its merits are real and should be credited. Raising awareness develops personal skills, one of the Ottawa Charter's five action areas, and awareness is frequently where advocacy begins, as the history of tobacco control demonstrates. Publicly committing to the goals signals institutional values and shapes what students come to regard as normal, which is not nothing. The $1,400 raised produces a real benefit through a legitimate health mechanism, since Goal 6 addresses water and sanitation and diarrhoeal disease remains a leading cause of death among children under five. Judged against the criteria that matter for local health improvement, however, the programme does not succeed. First, no local condition changed. The young people in that town still have no lit ground, no bus to the youth health service and no breakfast, and each of those is a measurable determinant of their health that sits squarely within the goals — Goals 2, 3, 10 and 11. Second, the only available measures are process measures: attendance at an assembly, dollars raised, and the number of goals students can name afterwards. No baseline was taken against any local health indicator, so no change could be demonstrated even if one occurred, and no result was disaggregated, so the programme could not detect whether it reached the young people being left behind. Third, participation was self-selecting, so it reached those already inclined to engage, which is the same mechanism by which behavioural strategies widen inequity. Fourth, no young person held a decision: on the ladder of community involvement this is informing, the lowest rung, not partnership. Applying the test of whether the framework changed anything, the programme appears to fail it: if the mufti day would have been held regardless and was mapped to a goal afterwards, the goals performed no function and the claim is decorative, which is what is meant by SDG-washing. My judgement is therefore that the school engaged with the goals as a topic of study rather than as a planning instrument, and that this is a failure of application rather than of intent. A better plan need not begin with a large new budget, but it should account for the staff time and practical resources needed to involve young people who are often missed by voluntary events. The school could work with a local community organisation to plan a breakfast programme, establish a baseline for breakfast access, and support students to submit a proposal to council for lighting and an additional afternoon bus. Existing staff and community channels may reduce extra cash costs; inclusive consultation and ongoing delivery still need realistic time and resource planning. This would connect a local need to measurable action, advocacy, community action and healthy public policy rather than awareness alone.
Multiple choice · 5 questions
MC 1. Localisation of the Sustainable Development Goals means:
- A. promoting awareness of the goals within a local school or workplace
- B. adapting the goals to local priorities and reporting local data against them
- C. raising money locally for programmes in developing countries
- D. a national government submitting its Voluntary National Review
MC 2. Local government is central to delivering the SDGs mainly because it controls:
- A. hospital funding and the training of health professionals
- B. taxation and the regulation of advertising
- C. the built environment, recreation facilities, planning and community services
- D. the national curriculum and school health education
MC 3. Which of the following is an outcome measure rather than a process measure?
- A. The number of coaching sessions delivered
- B. The number of students attending the launch assembly
- C. The amount of money raised by the fundraiser
- D. The proportion of participants still playing with the club six months later
MC 4. Presenting existing or superficial activity as contributing to the goals, without changing any decision, is known as:
- A. localisation
- B. SDG-washing
- C. disaggregation
- D. co-design
MC 5. A local programme reports that youth participation in sport rose overall, but does not report results by household income. The main weakness is that it cannot show whether it:
- A. delivered the activities it promised
- B. reached the young people who were being left behind
- C. was supported by the local council
- D. aligned with SDG 3
Short answer · exam style
SA 1. Understand Band 4 Explain the difference between raising awareness of the SDGs and localising them, using an example of each. (4 marks)
SA 2. Create Band 6 Propose how the SDGs could be applied to promote the health of young people in a local community, and justify your proposal. (6 marks)
SA 3. Evaluate Band 6 A school paints the seventeen goals on a wall, holds an assembly and fundraises for an overseas charity. Evaluate this as an application of the SDGs to improve local young people's health. (5 marks)
📖 Comprehensive answers (click to reveal)
Multiple choice: 1 → B. 2 → C. 3 → D. 4 → B. 5 → B.
Activity 1 guidance: Step 1 is where this activity is won or lost, and the instruction about reaching young people outside organised sport and student leadership is the part most often ignored. Those two groups are the easiest to survey and the least representative of the population the proposal exists for, so a needs assessment conducted entirely through them will reliably identify the needs of active, engaged students — which is the behavioural-approach inequity mechanism from Lesson 15 reappearing at the design stage. Practical alternatives include a local youth service, a skate park or shopping centre, an existing informal group, or asking through a trusted community organisation rather than through the school. On step 4, the requirement for two actors outside the health sector is doing deliberate work: it is the test of whether the SDG framework is contributing anything beyond the Ottawa Charter, and a table in which the school and the health service do everything has not used the goals. On step 6, answers that avoid the word "funding" are forced towards the mechanisms that actually produce durability — handing a component to an organisation that already exists and has its own reason to continue, or making an infrastructure change that persists without anyone maintaining a programme. The final instruction, to state your own two weakest answers, is the most valuable part of the activity and the one students most want to skip; every real proposal has weak points, and a plan that claims none has simply not been examined.
Activity 2 guidance: Question 2 is the one that most reliably exposes whether Card 04 has been understood. The answer is not that the council should care about health in general; it is that the specific levers in question — lighting, ground maintenance, planning, footpaths, community grants — are council responsibilities and nobody else's, so the health department could not deliver them even if it wanted to. Question 3 is a test of mediation rather than of argument: dismissing an existing programme guarantees the pitch fails, and the productive answer identifies which action area or which group the existing programme does not cover, usually young people who have disengaged from school and sport. Question 5 is the most instructive. Residents objecting to noise and light until eight o'clock are raising a legitimate interest, and the Charter treats reconciling such interests as core work rather than as obstruction. Strong answers offer something concrete — agreed hours shorter than requested, directional lighting that limits spill, a trial period with review, or a place for residents in the decision — and concede something real. An answer that treats the objection as unreasonable has not understood why mediation is one of the three strategies. The closing question about funding only one component tests whether the proposal is negotiable: lighting and breakfast largely stand alone, while coaching without a club to hand it to, and a reference group without a budget or a vote, mostly collapse.
SA 1 (4 marks): Awareness activity defined as promoting knowledge of the goals, with a valid example such as a display, assembly or fundraiser [1]. Localisation defined as adapting the goals to local priorities and reporting local data against them, with a valid example such as a council lighting a ground, a breakfast programme with a baseline survey, or a bus timetable change [1]. The difference in starting point identified — awareness starts from the goals, localisation starts from a local need identified with the community [1]. The difference in measurement identified — process measures such as attendance and money raised, against outcome measures showing change from a baseline [1]. An answer that treats awareness as worthless rather than as insufficient does not gain credit for the distinction, because the distinction is about function, not merit.
SA 2 (6 marks): A specific community and a specific need, with some evidence and ideally a statement of how the need was established [1]. SDG 3 plus at least two other goals, each with a genuine mechanism rather than an assertion of relevance [1]. Components designed across at least three Ottawa Charter action areas [1]. A named actor for each component, including at least one outside the health sector [1]. A baseline and an outcome indicator, with disaggregation by a group at risk [1]. A survival mechanism, plus justification of the proposal as a whole [1]. Generic proposals with no named community, no actors and no measures typically sit at two to three marks regardless of length; the specificity is what is being marked.
SA 3 (5 marks): Genuine merits credited — awareness as developing personal skills, institutional signalling, and a real benefit through a legitimate Goal 6 mechanism [1]. The absence of any changed local condition identified, with local needs named that sit within the goals [1]. The measurement failure identified — process measures only, no baseline, no disaggregation [1]. The reach and decision failures identified — self-selecting participation, and young people informed rather than deciding, the lowest rung of the ladder [1]. An explicit judgement plus a concrete alternative using the same effort, noting that existing staff or community channels may reduce additional cash costs, while inclusive outreach and delivery still require realistic time and resource planning [1]. An answer that simply calls the programme tokenism, without crediting what it achieves or proposing an alternative, cannot reach the top band because neither weighing nor recommendation has occurred.
Localisation is running the goals in both directions. Downwards: what do these goals mean here, and which of our own decisions bear on them? Upwards: report local data against the global indicators, so a local result is visible and comparable. Most of the 169 targets need local government to move, because councils hold the parks, paths, planning, lighting, halls and grants.
Awareness is not localisation. Awareness starts from the goals and produces knowledge, measured by attendance and dollars. Localisation starts from a local need identified with the community and produces a changed condition, measured against a baseline. Both have value; only one of them is what this dot point means by "being used".
The six steps, and the three that get skipped. Establish the need with the community; name the goals and targets; find the assets; design across at least three action areas; set a baseline and a disaggregated indicator; say how it survives. Steps 1, 5 and 6 are the ones that get skipped, they are the cheapest, and they are where proposals fail.
The two frameworks do different jobs. The SDGs tell you what matters, how to measure it, and why sectors outside health are responsible. The Ottawa Charter tells you what kind of action to take. Goals without action areas is a diagnosis with no treatment; action areas without goals has no measurement and no argument for anyone else to act.
And the test that runs through the last four lessons: would any decision have gone differently without the framework? If not, the framework was decoration — whether it is a national strategy mapped retrospectively or seventeen coloured squares on a wall near a canteen.
That completes Module 1. You began with what health means and why people define it differently, moved through how it is measured, what determines it, and how it is distributed among young people, then through the skills that strengthen individuals, the advocacy that changes communities, and finally the two frameworks — the Ottawa Charter and the Sustainable Development Goals — through which Australia acts. The thread connecting all eighteen lessons is one idea, and it is worth naming: health is produced by conditions, so improving it means changing conditions, and doing that requires working with the people who live in them.
Mark lesson as complete
Tick when you've finished the practice and review.